Berlinale Special 2006 - Reviews and reports.

Berlin International Film Festival 2006

Quick Time Video Downloads of presentations from Richard Rorty, Richard Goldstone, Quentin Skinner, Wim Wenders, Will Hutton, Tariq Ramadan, Amos Elon and many others...
PANORAMA & FORUM
Close to Home - dir: D. Hager & V. Bilu
This curiously unengaged film has two main characters, young women, naive and immature, perhaps poorly educated, or underachievers, whose preoccupations centre around personal trivialities and boyfriends. They are Israeli army conscripts, working at checkpoints and patrolling the streets of Jerusalem, checking peoples' identity papers. After a promising beginning in which a minor character refuses to body-search Palestinian women and gets carted off to prison for her troubles, the film proceeds as low level realism, switching between the barracks where the young women report for duty each day and the streets, where they carry out their duties with minimal commitment and spend most of their time loitering, or evading the attentions of their officers.

The characters remain unformed and there is little or no development in their perspectives in reaction to events. Apart from expressing mild dissatisfaction with their daily routine, there is nothing to suggest the women understand what they are doing and why they are there. Although one of them ends up in prison, this seems to make no impression on her character, or personality. This could be a film about girls carrying out market research questionnaires in a shopping mall. It ends with them driving round in circles on a moped. Most films about conscripts are based on the notion that putting young people into uniform is a waste of time and possibly a waste of their lives, consider Full Metal Jacket, but the dramatic structure of the narrative here provides no significant psychological development between the characters, a complete absense of political, or social awareness and a minimal shift in their personalities as a result of their experience, merely sullen post-adolescence. The performers do their best, but the writer and director might have given them some witty dialogue, a joke or two, or even the semblance of dramatic conflict.

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