Though army service is compulsory for women as well as men in Israel, of all the Israeli movies about the military, hardly any have centered on female soldiers. Until now.
Vidi Bilu, the co-writer and co-director of the riveting feature “Close to Home,” attests that women are treated as outsiders in the army. They typically view their hitch as an obligation, and when it’s over they’re eager to get on with their lives. Most men, on the other hand, consider the army a prized formative experience.
“Women have taken part for like 50 years, but nobody talks about it,” Bilu says. “They suppress this moment in their lives. Men don’t do [that] because they like to go back to this period of time. They like to talk about it.”
Bilu was working on a television script with a new acquaintance, Dalia Hager, when she found herself unexpectedly opening up about her army service for the first time in 15 years. After the TV project fell through, the duo penned a screenplay informed by the rebelliousness, frustration and impotence that Bilu experienced as a soldier.
“Close to Home” portrays two dissimilar 18-year-olds teamed up on their first army assignment — checking the IDs of Arabs on the streets of Jerusalem — while grappling with the usual tsuris of boyfriends, peer pressure and family.
A coming-of-age drama with political overtones, the film fluidly shifts the viewer’s sympathies from one woman to the other, and between the soldiers and the Arab civilians. In fact, Bilu confides, an alternate title for the film was “Back and Forth.”
“Close to Home” is shaping up as the high-profile Israeli drama of the year, with IFC Films planning a late-fall theatrical release. With its Bay Area premiere, it is the centerpiece film of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. The screening is co-sponsored by Tzavta, a program of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation’s Israel Center.
The movie has an immediacy that suggests the filmmakers are, at most, a decade removed from their military service. In fact, Bilu and Hager are both in their 40s. They set the story in the present not only to save money — period films are more expensive to shoot — but because the climate is essentially the same.
“It’s the same situation like it was 20 years ago,” Bilu says on the phone from Tel Aviv. “Except in my time I experienced a refrigerator with a bomb inside in the middle of Jerusalem. Now it’s suicide bombers.”
Although “Close to Home” makes its points with nuance and restraint, in conversation Bilu is outspoken about the film’s political message.
“In Israel you need to have the army,” she acknowledges. “But I wanted them to look a little bit ridiculous. In a way, the [main characters] are not responsible because the army is not for everybody. These girls just finished high school. What do you expect them to be? It’s a lie that they are heroic. You’re so young. You don’t know anything.”
As an admonition to Israel’s leaders more than a caution, Bilu advises, “Don’t put so much responsibility on such tiny shoulders.”
“Close to Home” hones in on the leads’ up-and-down relationship, not unlike an American movie set in a high school. But by questioning a basic component of Israeli society — mandatory army service — it is undeniably subversive.
“I wanted to take this moment in our life, which is such a routine moment, and open it and look at it very close, in a very tiny story,” Bilu explains. “It’s my way to go beneath the system, to make it a little bit shaky, to be rebellious or a little bit anarchist; to destroy the system from inside. [To] the people who make the decision about peace, if they will ever look at this film, ‘If you think an army is behind you, you may not have one.'”
Bilu worried that moviegoers tired of stories about the conflict and seeking escapism would skip it, but the film found an appreciative audience, primarily among young people.
“The old generation, my parent’s generation, says, ‘How can you speak like this?’ But the film doesn’t judge. It just shows the reality from both sides.”
So does Bilu think that military service should no longer be compulsory for Israeli women?
“It’s a very complicated question,” she concedes. “It’s getting easier to escape from the army [commitment]. It’s not the time of our parents. [People] want to study, they want to go abroad, they want to live. There are cracks in the wall.”
“Close to Home” screens with the short film “The Substitute” at 7 p.m. Tuesday, July 25 at the Castro Theatre, S.F.