Close to Home (2005) User Reviews

Very enjoyable film

[LazySod · 8/10 · 29 March 2007]

Or Close to Home as the international title goes is a film that tells the story of two young girls in the Israelian army. Their job: checking the identities of people on the street. One somewhat wild, really not wanting the job. One introverted and more eager to do her tasks. So far the setting of this film.

As a film this one works out rather well. The constant grim presence of danger ((suicide) terrorism) is clearly radiating from every scene. The two play convincingly enough to make the roles come alive and even though the pace of the film is rather low it stays interesting all the way through. There's always something going on, how small and insignificant it may be.

Visual effects used are down to Earth and with that a really good match with the general setting of the film. Choice of music has been done equally well and that makes for a very well worked out combination.

All in all a very enjoyable watch, if a little depressing.

8 out of 10 bored soldiers

A maze with no exit

[howard.schumann · 7/10 · 13 August 2007]

Two 18-year old female Israeli soldiers, polar opposites in personality, patrol a section of Jerusalem from morning until night, stopping every Palestinian they see on the street, asking for their ID, and recording the information on a government form. At checkpoints, Arab women must strip down to their underwear while a metal detector scans their bodies, their purses are searched, their makeup x-rayed, and food designed for their children is confiscated. Now in limited release, Close to Home, a film directed by two former Israeli soldiers, Dalia Hager and Vidi Bilu, examines the Israeli occupation, portraying a generation forced to perform invasive military tasks in the name of a state security system they seem barely committed to. Indeed the film suggests that both sides now feel powerless to bring to an end the constant insecurity, the terrorist threats, and the harassment.

At a border crossing, an Israeli soldier named Dana tells everyone to stop searching and go home. "I don't believe in it", she declares but Dana is put in prison for her rebellion and the film shifts elsewhere. Smadar (Smadar Sayar), an abrasive nonconformist has been placed in a unit with Mirit (Neama Shendar), an earnest young woman who takes her duties seriously, so seriously in fact that she is known as "the squealer", someone who reports fellow soldiers who slack off during patrol. The two are under orders not to socialize, smoke, eat, talk on a cellphone, or go shopping except during two half hour breaks but Smadar routinely breaks these rules as do other girls who alert each other on their cell phones whenever their superiors are in the area.

Mirit apologizes to a man whose misplaced ID card causes him to miss his bus and perhaps lose his job but Smadar calls her a moron for apologizing. Mirit barely tolerates Smadar's disdain of authority but things change slowly when a terrorist bomb goes off in their section and Mirit barely escapes injury. Mirit tries to be more like Smadar to the point where she is arrested and put in prison for one week for leaving her post to go dancing with a sleazy pick up while guarding a hotel. Smadar visits her in jail and gives her a gift of a hat she had been eyeing through a store window but Mirit rejects her overtures of friendship.

They slowly become friends, however, and then become enemies, then friends again, mimicking the clichés of cop-buddy movies. The film then chooses to focus on their growing closeness and "coming of age" rituals such as chasing boys and budding romances and the terrorist threat seems to recede into the background as if it was never that important. While it is good to see the Arab-Israeli conflict from the perspective of women soldiers and to learn more about the reality of the harassment of Palestinians, Close to Home raises more questions than it provides answers for and left me confused about the point it was really trying to make. Perhaps it simply mirrors the entire conflict – a maze with no exit.

Playing soldiers.

[msbull · 8/10 · 6 January 2007]

I lived in Israel in the eighties so I was interested to see if this film was realistic or a bit of soft propaganda. This opinion is based on what I used to see every day on the streets as, not being either Jewish or Israeli, I never had to do the military service myself. But I found the film very realistic and very enjoyable. Being pushed into assertive and sometimes aggressive roles and having to overcome the natural hesitation and shyness prominent in the majority of 18 - 20 year old girls is not a simple task. I thought the actors were totally at ease and natural in their roles. Perhaps they were just playing themselves and reliving their own experiences. I smiled at many of the things I remembered. The messy hair, the giggling, the smoking and eating in the streets. Sometimes you had the impression that they were schoolgirls in uniform and not soldiers. I think all this comes across in the film as does their reluctance at having to be there in the first place. It's a very good film.

transcending the neo-real

[cliffhanley_ · 7/10 · 16 June 2007]

Right in there at the opening, this has the frustration and humiliation of the Zionist checkpoints, but seen both from the young soldiers' as well as the victim's points of view. Bags being thrown open, cigarettes destroyed, strip searches and then one of the girl conscripts rebels and refuses to strip another woman, throwing the doors open and yelling at all those waiting, 'Go home! You can all go home!' In the inevitable line-up for recrimination, little Mirit (Shendar, remarkably like Johnny Depp's little sister) pipes up to say it wasn't her. When the commander demands an explanation, the refusnik explains 'She means it was me.' Mirit, who is determined to be a Good Soldier, unfortunately finds herself teamed with rebellious Smadar. They do, though, have a lot in common. Boys, little personal conflicts, sneaky coffee or fag breaks. Having to fill their log books with enough ID search records each day; which incidentally is an insight into what British police will have to spend much of their time doing when the UK government introduces ID cards and extended police powers to stop-and-search. Mirit and Smadar have to work very hard just to make life difficult for the Palestinians, and at times it looks as if even Mirit is drifting towards rebellion. A warning passed round among the girls by cellphone that the commander is on the prowl, so that they must be on their best behaviour, results in one of the laugh-out-loud scenes in the film. No clues! The use of 'dogme'-style camera is quite deceptive; hand-held cameras and lots of telephoto shots, but towards the end of the movie it gets progressively sophisticated; in all it's seductive. Again, it's the minutiae of these girls' lives that this is about. Of course that they are lived against the brutal contrast of Palestinian life, makes everything so much more tangible. One easy-going man in the street, half jokingly suggests that he might not show his ID, and this escalates into a big fight (in white-out), out of which float the two girls, their sad beauty emphasised by bike helmets and only their faces filling the screen, literally like icons, reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick's Spaceman. More than neo-realism, and more than drama-doc. CLIFF HANLEY

living with terrorism

[Buddy-51 · 7/10 · 23 August 2007]

Imagine living in a world where the bus you are riding on could, at any given moment, detonate into a fiery deathtrap in a deliberate act of mass murder, or the café you are sitting at be rocked to its very foundations by a well-placed briefcase filled with explosives. How would living in so perpetual a state of high alert affect the things you did, the places you went to, the people you saw? And how would such an environment determine the structure of the society itself, the laws it proscribed and the way in which it treated its people? And could terrorism itself become such a commonplace and familiar fact of everyday life that even it might lose the ability to shock and horrify the very people closest to it?

Finding the means of successfully combating terrorism has, of course, become a life-or-death necessity for the people of Israel. One of their responses to the threat has been to instigate mandatory military service for all their young people. Another has been to subject Arabs to legal random searches - simply for being Arabs. In the Israeli film, "Close to Home," Smadar and Mirit are two young Army officers whose job it is to check the ID's of anyone in their assigned area who happens to look like a Palestinian. Possibly because they have grown up with terrorism as a regular part of their lives, these girls seem to have developed a strange immunity to its effects, for neither seems overly impressed with the seriousness of the job they are doing - although, of the two, Mirit is a little more concerned about what might happen to them were they found to be in any way derelict in their duties. Smadar and Mirit are not exactly natural buddies, but, over time, they develop a certain tenuous closeness that seems sure to blossom into a full-fledged friendship by the end of the story. Or will it?

"Close to Home" is more of a naturalistic study of the day-to-day lives of these two women than it is a heavily plotted narrative. Most of the film is spent chronicling their interactions with their military superiors, the random people they are forced to interrogate, and, most importantly, each other. Smadar Sayar and Neama Shendar create believable, memorable characters who perform their task more out of a sense of duty than a fiery love of country. It's only when an explosion hits a little too close to home that they are, at least momentarily, shaken out of their lethargy. But even that doesn't last for long, as the girls begin to slack off at their jobs once again, with Smadar becoming an ever more potentially corrupting influence on the decidedly less rebellious Mirit.

If the filmmakers, Vardit Bilu and Dalia Hager, have a political point to make, it is well hidden beneath the deceptively casual surface of the girls' relationship. For this is, first and foremost, a story about Smadar and Neama, about two Israeli youngsters who, despite the extraordinary conditions under which they are forced to live, are basically interested in the same things that preoccupy young people the world over: moving away from home, pursuing romantic interests, deciding on hairstyles and fashions. If anything, the filmmakers seem to be saying that it really isn't possible for the human mind to exist in a state of constant readiness no matter how great the threat, that eventually the concerns of common everyday life will rise to the surface and crowd most everything else out. Bilu and Hager clearly acknowledge the reality of the terrorist threat, but they also know that a life ruled by fear is no life at all.

In a subtle but persuasive way, the movie also raises the extremely touchy question of just how far a nation should go in abrogating the civil liberties of any single group in exchange for increased safety. It is an issue Israel has been dealing throughout its entire existence, and the movie makers clearly acknowledge that there is no simple solution to that conundrum - a conundrum that has, unfortunately, become increasingly relevant beyond the limits of the Israeli border.

Reality!

[mmunier · 21 March 2009]

On TV last night, we decided to give it a go. If you don't know by now it's the story of two Israeli female recruited soldiers whose task is to check Arrabs ID for national security. Since I too have been recruited by the French army to do my military service, I could well identify with some of the feelings expressed by them and other soldiers. The difference between their situation and mine, their's had danger, mine was more like a game. Yet the situation was , in some ways, so similar are they were people drawn to an unusual environment most likely without their consent to perform tasks they had not fully taken on board. Possibly what is going in Israel, for them was part of life, but not really their life. At least that what I got from the movie, this sense of reality. Their life was well above the national security, their life was the one most young people go through. their maturing, their dream their want. So, as I remember too, the army was something they had to go through and so be it but it did not stop the more important things in their life. Although the film shows quite a contrast of personality between these two main characters it shows too a similar humanity in both of them that will play a role. It is quite thought provoking. You wonder what was the extent of their power, or their feeling to intrude in others life, their sense of duty. But reality works at different level and when one bomb explodes it stresses that fact and shows the impact it has on those soldiers. It reminds me of someone I knew, a strong headed person who ended up being sent to Algeria in active service. their group was sent to dislodge rebels out of cave. The group "gun ho" had taken position but as it was their first mission had no idea of "reality" Whilst they were ordered to lye down one had still his lower leg folded up. Reality struck in the form of a bullet through his ankle. And they learned a new level of reality! This is how I saw this movie.

Israeli - Palestinian Relations - Time to Rethink Current Strategies

[raiderhayseed · 6/10 · 17 November 2013]

On 14 May 1948, a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel was established.The following day, the armies of four Arab countries—Egypt, Syria, Transjordan and Iraq—entered what had been British Mandate Palestine, launching the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. It was a case of an ill-equipped army defending a new homeland with a population of half a million against armies representing a combined population of forty-eight million.

In fact it was more than that. It was a case of an ill-equipped, vastly outnumbered army defending land, almost all of which had been purchased over the preceding hundred years from its original owners by Zionist groups on behalf of the Jewish National Fund. The Israeli armed forces won a praiseworthy reputation for the manner in which they fought to defend Israel, the land and its people.

The proportion of land owned by the Jewish National Fund is reported to be around 13% by 2007, according to the Wikipedia entry on that institution. The discrepancy arises from the land obtained by military conquest since 1948.

By 2005, when "Close to Home" was made, the young Israeli conscripts have been reduced to the boring and uninspiring task of patrolling the streets of Jerusalem stopping Palestinian passersby, asking for their identity cards, and to writing down their details on special forms. That is a long way from the training of sabras in the use of military weapons and procedures to be used in defending their homeland against attack by foreign armies. In fact it brings to mind the pointless US "war on drugs" depicted in such films as "Traffic". Their efforts will only make the real villains - in the Israeli case, the terrorist aggressors - exercise more evasive techniques, while gratuitously offending the great majority of Palestinians who live in and around Israel and who do not engage in such violence

The film begins with a young conscript refusing to search a Palestinian going about her peaceful business as she crosses the Israeli border. The conscript is sent to prison, where she is required, along with other miscreant conscripts, to sort buttons. The viewer can not help but wonder which is the more meaningful employment - sorting buttons or harassing Palestinians.

The two central characters spend their time looking in shop windows, visiting hair dressers, smoking, contemplating true romance, and half heartedly taking down details of a few Palestinians. It is hardly riveting, involving cinema. The IMDb synopsis by writers-directors Vidi Bilu and Dalia Hager suggests that, "As women, this film is our own way of soul searching, about our army service and the occupation" The film, like many Israeli films, seems to be questioning the policies of the country's leaders. These films may well represent the best hope, not just for Palestinians who do not seek the violent overthrow of the state of Israel, but for those Israelis who take seriously the words of their own prophets... Jeremiah(7:5-8) If you really change your ways and your actions and deal with each other justly, if you do not oppress the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow and do not shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not follow other gods to your own harm, then I will let you live in this place, in the land I gave your ancestors for ever and ever.  But look, you are trusting in deceptive words that are worthless.

Most Original and Enjoyable.

[shmulik-cohen · 10/10 · 18 March 2006]

There have been a few Movies about Israeli Women soldiers, But most films about the army have been about Male soldiers. I agree with the comment from Miami that it is so well done that you do not have to be Israeli or Female to enjoy it.

Also I liked it as it has heavy hints about the situation in Israel in recent years with Intifada 2. But the movie is Human and not Political. Filmed mainly in central Jerusalem and is realistic. You see what happens when a "Pigua" (Terror Explosion) happens. But you also see 18 year old Youngsters growing up the hard way. Directed by two Women Vardit Bilu and Dalia Hagar the movie is thru women's eyes.

The only 'girls in the army' 'buddy movie' I can remember... only in Israel! :)

[DB1041 · 9/10 · 6 March 2006]

A thoroughly enjoyable movie about two girls in the Magav (Israeli Border Police), assigned to patrol Jerusalem together but with personalities worlds apart. Mirit is somewhat shy and timid- the 'nice girl next door' type, while Smadar is somewhat of a rebellious wild child. The daily stress of their patrols, spiced up with some humor and a little female bonding, pulls them closer together than further apart, and an unexpected friendship develops. The cast's ample beauty certainly doesn't hurt, but their acting is not to be underestimated either. The audience connects with the characters, and that can't be said about many films these days... highly recommended.

Many guys have trouble being assertive and aggressive

[SipteaHighTea · 10/10 · 14 May 2009]

I enjoy seeing the movie Close to Home on the IFC channel. I think it is also hard for males who have nice personalities to becoming assertive and sometimes assume aggressive roles and overcoming the natural hesitation and shyness especially when they are police officers and/or soldiers.

You can't blame nice guys for being that way when they were brought up to be gentlemen and not taught how to stick up for themselves against rude, aggressive bullies (males and females) and authoritarian figures. Furthermore, if they were to talk back to their officers and sergeants about things that they saw were morally wrong, they would be court-martial for being insubordinate and disrespectful to their superiors. And then the officers,sergeants, and police supervisors would complain about their people not showing initiative or taking charge of a situation. People can't do their jobs on their own if they are always constantly be told to shut up and not do anything unless instruction to do so.