Films about the military are almost always going to involve politics. What’s far more rare is for these politics to be open to interpretation. Few films manage to successfully address the role of the military without either condoning or condemning its use and place within society. Sure, all but the most crass examples contain shades of gray, but even fewer deliberately try to paint themselves as gray as possible. Close to Home, the debut film from Israeli writer-directors Dalia Hangar and Vidi Bilu, accomplishes this unlikely feat with surprising ease; posing its viewers a variety of questions without any hints at the answers.
    The film follows Smadar (Smadar Sayar) and Mirit (Neema Shendar), two young Jewish women in the early stages of their mandatory two-year service in the Israeli Defense Force. The two spend their days patrolling the streets of Jerusalem, carrying out orders to stop and record the information of every Arab they see. The free-spirited rebel, Smadar, objects to this process, which causes friction between her and her new partner, the straight-laced Mirit. A standard plot involving two different people coming to understand each other and, eventually, becoming friends gradually unfolds. The two leads handle this predictable plot admirably, but without any real surprises
    What is surprising, though, is the profoundly human portrayal of Smadar, Mirit and the rest of the women in their unit dealing with forced conscription. Instead of unquestioning obedience and fanatical loyalty, the characters in Close to Home treat their military service as an unpleasant job. This, of course, leads to most of the girls taking their duties lightly, raising the question of whether the conscription of unwilling Israeli men and women is actually beneficial to the controversial country’s security.
    Naturally, the question becomes even more pertinent, and more difficult to answer, when a suicide bombing rocks Smadar and Mirit’s sector of Jerusalem, forcing the two to come to grips with the grim reality of their situation. Hager and Bilu could have easily attempted to either redeem or vilify the role of the military and conscription in Israeli society, but fortunately, they avoid these pitfalls. Instead, they keep Close to Home ambiguous, forcing audiences to decide for themselves if Smadar, Mirit and their ilk are performing a vital function in Jerusalem, exacerbating the problem, or are just helpless bystanders in a situation that spun out of anyone’s control long ago.