SFJFF: Campfire
Whoever writes the copy for the film blurbs for the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival needs to watch the films a bit more closely. At least whoever wrote the blurb for Campfire. What we thought we were going to see was a drama about a widowed mother making her own way in one of the settlements in the Gaza Strip, a story of a strong woman defying the settlement's leadership, giving us a street-level view of one of the most contentious issues in the Middle East.
What we got instead was the story of an Israeli woman, Rachel (Michaela Eshet), who is somewhat in mourning a year after her husband's death from cancer. Rachel tries to uproot her daughters, Esti (Maya Maron) and Tami (Hani Furstenberg), against their will to take part in a burgeoning settlement with a bunch of people she doesn't really care that much about. The movie is barely about the politics of settlement -- or politics at all, really, though it contains at one point a somewhat inexplicable denouncement of Shimon Peres, who, at the time of the film's setting, 1981, had just lost an election as the head of the Labor party but who would later go on to be Prime Minister.
The biggest problem in the movie is Rachel herself. Though she's supposed to be a flawed but sympathetic character, she's simply flawed: though her husband was apparently a good person, she doesn't really miss him and doesn't seem to have tried to help her daughters through their grief, which appears to have been larger than hers. It seems that we're supposed to see her as a strong person for wanting to leave her somewhat comfortable apartment to risk joining the settlement, but we're never really given a solid reason for her decision. Given that the rest of her life has been so passive, the one part of her life where she attempts to be a catalyst is almost totally unexplained.
Her daughters are drawn with more nuance: Esti is rebellious to Rachel but caring toward her younger sister, Tami, while Tami just wants to survive her awkward adolescence. Tami struggles with her feelings for Rafi (Oshri Cohen), a boy from her youth group, and it's this part of the story that leads to the heart-wrenching scene that gives the movie its name.
Rachel, meanwhile, has her own problems with love. Set up on two blind dates by the wife of the settlement's leader, she meets Yossi (Moshe Ivgy), a kind minibus driver who's never been with a woman (no 40-year-old virginity hilarity here, however), as well as a Moshe (Yehoram Gaon), a pompous singer who's probably had too many women in his day.
The settlement itself plays only a tiny role, though it might be fair to say that all the main characters are unsettled and looking for some kind of rest. To that end, this might have been a better film had the themes and characters been better developed, or perhaps just better focused.
Campfire is part of the festival's emphasis this year on Israeli-made films, and the JFF has noted with some pride that the movie won five awards from the Israeli version of the Oscars, including best picture. Despite its flaws, it is at least wonderfully acted, which elevates it into something at least interesting to watch, if ultimately unrewarding. Come to think of it, that's frequently how we feel about the movies that win best picture in this country. Oh, well.