By James Bowman on 2.28.07 @ 12:02AM
Imagine if Maureen Dowd were a soldier in the Israeli army.
Those who believe that the Israeli Defense Force offers us a
model of how to deploy women in the armed services should take a
look at Close to Home (Karov la bayit) by 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 together and sent out into the streets of Jerusalem to
check the ID cards of Arabs and register them on official forms
that are carried on their clipboards and that they will later
submit to the security bureaucracy.
The task doesn't make sense to them -- as it probably doesn't
either to the film-makers, since they are completely uninterested
in the workings of the Israeli security apparatus except as they
are a nuisance to a couple of teenagers looking for a good time --
and they perform it badly. 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 says finally, with a
take-it-or-leave-it attitude. The two girls are opposite types:
Mirit is pretty but timid and with a natural deference to
authority; Smadar is striking-looking and sexy, though not
conventionally pretty. She is a rebel and a slacker who at first
despises her comparatively spiritless partner, especially when she
does things like apologizing to an Arab whom she has caused to miss
his bus.
"Why say sorry?" says Smadar. "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 they develop a tentative
friendship. Mirit introduces Smadar to her parents, and the warmth
of their welcome to their daughter's "friend" actually helps bring
the friendship into existence.
As it develops, Smadar leads Mirit into uncharacteristically
rebellious behavior. One day, as the two are doing security bag
searches at an international hotel, one of the male guests takes a
shine to Mirit, and Smadar urges her to take up his invitation to
follow him to the bar for a few minutes. When their superior
officer (Sharon Reginiano) shows up unexpectedly, Smadar tries to
cover for her friend by telling her that Mirit has gone to the
ladies' room, but the officer finds her dancing in the bar and poor
Mirit is sentenced to do time in a military stockade for leaving
her post.
Mirit assumes that Smadar has betrayed her and asks to be
reassigned to another partner when she comes out. Smadar, still
assuming that they are best friends, goes with her parents to visit
Mirit in jail and is shocked at being snubbed. Will they become
permanently estranged, or will the two friends manage to patch it
up again? The striking thing about the movie to me was that the
film-makers appeared to take all this stuff as seriously as the two
young women themselves do. Their girlish affections and
misunderstandings, "mean" behavior and pouting at each other's
insensitivity ought to make a strong contrast with the presumably
life-and-death matters on which they are employed but do not. Apart
from the one bomb blast -- whose only on-screen 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 clothes or hairdressing shops 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, who don't like the unisex assumptions on which their
military obligations are founded and who are inclined to believe
that all the military rigmarole these young girls are subjected to
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 IDF is really anything like this, at least you
will have learned something that is likely to have momentous
consequences for the future of Israel.
topics:
Military, Israel
