Film

Close to Home (2005)

Director: Dalia Hager, Vidi Bilu

Movie review

From Time Out London

Generally underwhelming and disappointingly parochial, Vardit Bilu and Dalia Hagar’s rites-of-passage drama is at least paved with good intentions. It follows two 18-year-old female Israeli conscripts, by-the-book Mirit (Neama Shendar) and rebellious  Smadar (Smadar Sayar), through their military service, spent patrolling Jerusalem with clipboards notating the ID numbers of Palestinians. The filmmakers’ laudable purpose is to highlight the under-represented experience of women soldiers within an adolescent context, exploring the difficulties these women have assimilating the moral implications of their reluctantly assumed role of political policewomen while still struggling with their own development. Shendar and Sayar are pretty and engaging, but their will-they-bond-or-won’t-they relationship is a little strained and unconvincing, while the film’s emphasis on minutiae – illicit fag breaks, quick clothes-shopping trips – becomes finally trivialising, leaving the larger political questions unaddressed.

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