Two 18-year-old girls – reluctant partners – fulfill their compulsory military service patrolling the streets of Jerusalem in Vidi Bilu and Dalia Hager’s
Close to Home. Their assignment is ethically compromising at best, and might be pointless too: they’re supposed to approach Arabs on buses and sidewalks, request their identity cards, and take down their information. Mirit (Neama Shendar) – shy and conscientious – wants to play by the book; Smadar (Smadar Sayar) is outspoken in her defiance. The story traces the tumultuous relationship between the girls and their apparently opposing approaches to life.
The filmmakers use war and ethnic conflict as a backdrop on which to explore the paradoxes and challenges inherent in the passage to womanhood. The girls wear soldier’s uniforms but they seem to be armed with just radios and clipboards. The Arab men they confront tower over them, but in most cases immediately acquiesce to their demands. (These confrontations are grim and formal. They play about as erotic as an inoculation. In case anyone was wondering.).
In a downpour, a crowd gathers under a dripping awning. Mirit notices a man standing next to her encumbered with bundles, trying to stay dry. Is he Arab? Does their common humanity, highlighted by the simple, shared predicament of being caught in the rain, exempt him from suspicion? We see her nerving herself up to ask for his identity card, much to Smadar's exasperation and disgust. Yet it’s Smadar, the hot-tempered rebel, who increasingly finds herself on the edge of violence, while Mirit struggles to escape from her constricting sense of fear and duty.
Close to Home is too nuanced to dictate any particular political agenda. Depending on your views you could see it as a study of the evils of occupation, or of the moral ambiguity of war, or more broadly, of the moral ambiguity of living. Smadar and Mirit are forced to make decisions most of us let others make for us. The consequences of their decisions are powerful, immediate, and unpredictable. One constant in the movie: the consequences of all the self-consciously moral decisions are bad, so they don’t yield answers. They yield riddles.
The girls aimlessly wander their beat. Smadar breaks every rule, ducking into shops when they’re supposed to be working – even into a salon for a hair consult – urging Mirit to do the same. Mirit begs her to come back outside, terrified they’ll both be punished for Smadar’s infractions. As they take down strangers’ identity numbers the girls are uncovering their own emerging adult identities – in their attitudes toward boyfriends, personal responsibility, and friendship. The harsh realities of life in modern Israel sadden, but do not dim the exuberance, of this textured take on universal coming-of-age themes.
Sarah Bardin writes and lives in New York City.
