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Trailer for "Close to Home"

At the beginning of Close to Home, a disgusted, mutinous member of the Israeli army disrupts the Palestinian-screening operations of a border-crossing facility. This young woman, fed up with the lengthy, intrusive examination of Arabs seeking to enter or exit Israel, summarily dismisses the woman with her in an interrogation booth, and then loudly tells all the people waiting outside to leave without processing. She ends up court-martialed and imprisoned.

This sequence can easily create the expectation the film is going to focus on the tense, often violent, decades-long confrontation between Israel and the Palestinians, and on some Israelis’ doubt about their country’s treatment of an occupied people. To the contrary, Vidi Bilu and Dalia Hager’s intimate but socially observant movie is primarily concerned with a smaller theme: the uneasy, unlikely relationship between two young female soldiers, Smadar (Smadar Sayar) and Mirit (Naama Schendar).

Paired as an ID-inspection team in Jerusalem, neither of them is comfortable with the assignment, or with her partner. Their recalcitrance isn’t politically based. They’re distaff sad sacks, involuntarily cast as citizen-soldiers by Israel’s nearly universal military requirement.

Smadar is smart, youthfully cynical and impulsive. Mirit is sheltered, quietly discontented and inhibited. (Mirit had wanted to be assigned further from her home and the parents she lives with; hence the title.) Both of them are immature in their individual ways. Both go about their duties reluctantly and haphazardly, flouting break regulations and other rules, usually at Smadar’s instigation.

Nothing of much obvious moment happens in the film, despite the frightening but off-camera interruption of a bomb explosion on a city street. (The filmmakers are discrete about this; there’s only a little blood splattered on Mirit and no depiction of injuries.) The film follows the young women and their mostly repetitious daily experiences, punctuating them with odd moments of mild, warm humor. There is a series of intermittent observations of urban life in Israel, including a few glimpses of the burdens placed on Arab existence.

For all its low-key, somewhat flattened-out tone, Close to Home develops an oblique appeal. Its portrayal may disconcert because it doesn’t seem to reflect the besieged, determined spirit that Americans have often identified as characteristic of Israeli life.

The film may also disappoint those who follow its rather mundane events in anticipation of an at-least modest payoff. It ends somewhat abruptly and awkwardly, in a sudden gesture of human connection, as if there was no real point the film’s creators were waiting to reveal.