Opting Out of the Good Fight
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Those who believe that the Israeli Defense Forces offer a model of how to deploy women in the armed services should take a look at “Close to Home,” by the directors Dalia Hager and Vidi Bilu.
Like everyone in Israel, male and female, the co-directors had to perform a period of military service at age 18. When the two women met some time later, they thought it odd that no one had ever made a movie about the lives of women in the army and decided to remedy the deficiency.
Their story concerns two young draftees, Mirit (Naama Shendar) and Smadar (Smadar Sayar), who are teamed up and sent out into the streets of Jerusalem. There, they check the ID cards of Arabs and register them on official forms that will later be submitted to the security bureaucracy.
The task doesn’t make sense to them — nor, apparently, to the filmmakers, who are uninterested in the workings of the Israeli security apparatus except in its being a nuisance to a couple of teenagers looking for a good time — and it is a task they perform poorly. There is a chuckle or two when Smadar brings back an empty form and refuses to speculate on the reasons for her failure to find any Arabs in Jerusalem. “Maybe I don’t know what an Arab looks like,” she finally says, with a take-it-or-leave-it attitude.
The two girls are opposite types: Mirit is pretty but timid, with a natural deference to authority; Smadar is striking and sexy, though not conventionally pretty. She is a rebel and a slacker who at first despises her comparatively spiritless partner, especially when Mirit does things like apologize to an Arab whom she has caused to miss his bus.
“Why say sorry?” Smadar asks. “You’re such a moron!”
Mirit lives at home with her parents (Ami Weinberg and Katia Zinbris) while Smadar, whose parents live abroad, has her own apartment in Jerusalem. Mirit is deeply unhappy with her army life and doesn’t fit in well. She wants to transfer to another unit far from home. Smadar, though more independent, is also lonely.
When a terrorist bomb goes off nearby and Mirit faints, the experience brings the two girls together, and a tentative friendship develops. When Mirit introduces Smadar to her parents, the warmth of their welcome helps the friendship grow. Smadar gradually leads Mirit into uncharacteristically rebellious behavior. One day, as the two are conducting security bag searches at an international hotel, one of the male guests takes a shine to Mirit, and Smadar urges her to accept his invitation to follow him to the bar for a few minutes.
When their superior officer (Sharon Reginiano) shows up unexpectedly, Smadar tries unsuccessfully to cover for her friend, but Mirit is sentenced to a military stockade for leaving her post. Mirit assumes that Smadar has betrayed her and asks to be reassigned to another partner when she is released. Will they become permanently estranged, or will the two friends manage to patch it up?
The striking thing about “Close to Home” is that Ms. Hager and Ms. Bilu appear to take these comparatively marginal adolescent “issues” as seriously as the two main characters do. Their girlish affections and misunderstandings, “mean” behavior, and pouting at each other’s insensitivity ought to make a for strong contrast with the presumably life-and-death matters on which they are employed, but they do not.
Apart from the one bomb blast — whose only onscreen consequence is some drifting smoke, some emergency crews loading people onto stretchers, and Mirit’s fainting — the terrorist threat is allowed to seem as remote to us as it obviously does to the two soldiers as they duck into clothing shops or salons when they are not being checked up on, or register few Arabs, or none, when they are.
The directors are, I take it, feminists of the Maureen Dowd school. They don’t like the unisex assumptions on which their military obligations are founded, and believe that all the military rigmarole to which these young girls are subjected is really just a lot of masculine silliness getting in the way of their growing up and living independent lives.
If you don’t share this belief, you may find, as I did, that the movie is difficult to like. But if the Israeli Defense Forces are really anything like this, at least you will have learned something that is likely to have momentous consequences for the future of Israel.
