Sadly Over-hyped

One of the best films i have seen

Lack of good storyline.

Good concept, poorly executed.

I saw this film with a group of 60 people, most of whom stayed for a discussion afterward. The story seemed relatively straight-forward to me. SPOILERS: It takes place in the 1980's. A group of people associated with the B'nai Akiva (modern Orthodox/Zionists)want to establish a settlement on the West Bank close to the Palestinian city of Ramallah. The focus is on a young widow and her two teenage daughters. The woman desperately wants to be accepted into the community. The difficulty from the group's standpoint is that she has no husband, and this is a highly patriarchal society in which a woman's place is definitely NOT as head of a family. Rachel, the mother goes on a couple of blind dates, one with a man (Yossi) who operates his own bus (Mini-Yossi), the other with a pompous man-of-the-world who is a cantor in his spare time and who considers himself and artist and is considered an artist by others. Yossi, never married, is a middle aged virgin, very plain. In the beginning, Rachel is not attracted to him, nor to the cantor. It is not until much later in the picture, as Rachel begins to reveal herself to Yossi, that we learn she never loved her husband and, though it is unrealistic, she wants to fall in love with someone who makes the sparks fly. The older of the teen-age daughters, Esty, is busy trying to make out with her boyfriend behind closed doors. Tammy, 15, is also very interested in her own sexuality. In the scene that is the movie's centerpiece, Tammy and a girl friend follow the "bad boys" of the group to a huge bonfire where Tammy is assaulted by the oldest member of the group (her friend has immured herself in a nearby automobile) and raped or, at the very least, seriously abused by the gang leader and several of its members. Graffiti describing her as a whore are soon all over the stone walls of the neighborhood in which she lives. Rachel is accused of being completely self-centered. Facing the crisis in her family, she takes a vote on whether to join the settlement community, and when they vote to accept her despite her status as a single mother, she tells them she is no longer interested. When the credits roll, the audience is left to anticipate that she will have sex with Yossi and perhaps marry him. Tammy never reveals exactly what happened to her but in the final scene announces that she plans to have a happy year. When the film was over and the discussion began, the Israeli-born woman leading the discussion began to talk about B'nai Akiva and the settler movement of the 1980's. Several other Israelis present insisted that the movie had little to do with B'nai Akiva but was representative of sexism which pervaded ALL of Israel in the 1980's. Although the discussion leader and others tried to talk about the director's intent (which was certainly a comment on the specific characteristics of the B'nai Akiva movement), the other Israelis would have none of it. They insisted it could have happened anywhere with any group of Israelis. A point that interested me, but did not get much attention during the discussion, was that, apart from the knit skull caps worn by the men and boys in the film, there were no sign that religion played any part at all in the life of the aspiring community.Was Tammy raped? Perhaps there was no sexual intercourse but she was certainly assaulted and shamed? Was Rachel all that selfish? Not in my eyes. She was trying to make a place for herself in a patriarchal society. Were the rebellions of her two daughters justified? They were teenagers, experimenting with their own sexuality, and they had lost their father, whom they apparently adored. Did Tammy "invite" the abuse? By the standards of the 1980's, she certainly did. She went searching for the boys and told a dirty joke to fit into the crowd. But it was also clear that she did not expect to be sexually abused and did not "want it," as the boy she was most attracted to inferred. I felt it was an interesting movie and that it was about what it was about -- and not about all Israelis during that period.

"Campfire (Medurat Hashevet)" will probably draw the most attention for its insights into West Bank settlers of the 1980's, but I found it more intriguing as a moving and humor-filled portrait of a family caught at the conflict between feelings and society, particularly in a boys will be boys culture. Like "Broken Wings (Knafayim Shvurot)," this is an Israeli family with teenagers struggling with apolitical grief, but that was a secular family. Like "Upside of Anger," there's a grieving mom struggling with teenage daughters as all are dealing with their loneliness and sexuality. Like "Welcome to the Dollhouse" and "Smooth Talk," it deals with teen girls susceptibility to guys. "Saved!" showed teens dealing with some these issues in a comparable conservative community, but satirically unsympathetic. Here instead we have a mother in a situation that would be difficult in any time, any place. The mother has just finished her year of mourning for her husband and is at loose ends, financially, emotionally and as a now single parent of daughters anxious to get on with their lives. All three are vulnerable to persuasion. But they happen to be a modern Orthodox family in Israel so their normal developmental stages are buffeted by religious and social strictures on their behavior. The mother is attracted to the possibility of joining her husband's friends in a group to found a West Bank settlement, more for the companionship and structure it would give to her and her family's life than for zealotry. I'm sure American audiences miss a lot of the political references during scenes of organizing committee meetings, applicant interviews and singing, sloganeering and film viewing (let alone subtleties involved with types and angles of head coverings and length of skirts worn, eating habits and the summer fast day of Tisha b'Av), but the diversity of motivations and social hypocrisy of many of those involved does come through. Going through the process of dealing with these friends and their expectations makes her stronger as an individual, particularly as she reflects on her marriage and what she wants from future relationships.The triangle of the younger and older women's relationships is among the most emotionally frank I've seen on film in its honesty about insecurities, confusions and peer pressure in male-female relationships, symbolized throughout by the father's car and how they and the guys around them deal with it. While the mother is pushed to re-enter the dating pool and explores a relationship with some similarity to how Catherine Keener sweetly handles "The 40 Year Old Virgin," the older daughter focuses on her one-track minded hunky soldier boyfriend, seems to be rebelliously secular and is opposed to moving. The younger daughter absorbs all these contradictory signals. There's a marvelous scene of her exuberantly dancing to romantic pop music at home by herself that is straight out of "My So-Called Life" (or the totemic equivalent for guys "Risky Business") to show that in the U.S. she'd be considered a typical teen ager. Her curiosity about boys is therefore not surprising, so that the adults around her seem rigidly clueless in not expecting that restlessness from her when the appeal of the bad boy is clearly universal. There are occasional references to the complexities of a diversifying Israel that Americans can understand, as when the mother comments the B'nei Akiva youth group isn't the same as when she was young. The actresses are refreshingly not Hollywood beautiful, though it is clearly a running visual joke when the safe guy choices are not just nerdy but are bursting their untucked shirt buttons, even as it is sympathetic to their pressures as well, making the alternatives that much more attractive.While this is no "Norma Rae" or "My Brilliant Career" as a feminist tract, nor is it the anti-Orthodox agit-prop of "Kadosh," the film has a strong, fair and balanced humanistic and sweetly forgiving point to make about women in a male-dominated society who are expected to act a certain way and the consequences they face when they step out of line -- and how the men who love them can be supportive as they learn to live together. While "Campfire" is distributed unrated by the MPAA in the U.S., as a parent I would give it a PG-13. It deals with some of the same issues as PG-rated "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" but in a more serious and mature way as applied to a younger teen.

The first question that popped in my head once the ending credits appeared, was- should I be offended?This movie, after all, deals with religious-Zionists and I am a movie-buff secular so maybe the depiction of this much maligned (for no justifiable reason, in my humble opinion) sector was credible and not a slanderous attack. I believe I have reached a conclusion.Today, when a new rift in Israel is emerging over the implementation of the disengagement program lead by prime minister, Ariel Sharon, it's easy to relate to the 1981 struggle against the evacuation of the Sinai peninsula after the signing of the historical peace accord with Egypt.1981 found Tammy Gerlik (Hani Furstenberg in a wonderful performance) in a Jerusalemite neighborhood with her older sister and widowed mom who decides to move to a new settlement in the occupied territories with her circle of the religious, patriotic and unified but also hypocrite and mistrusting circle of friends. It also finds Tammy in her teenage years when romantic feelings and self-defining questioning begin to emerge. Her generally cheerful personality suffers a major setback when Tammy is nearly raped by a violent teenager with the cheering of his dubious "buddies". With a mother too self-absorbed, and "friends" that tag her as a promiscuous girl, she finds a soul mate in her rebellious sister that is alienated to her mother for abolishing her chance of privacy in a very boisterously funny scene that involves a hammer (can't elaborate, sorry).In the meantime, the mother, Rachel (Micaela Eshet, in a reasonably good but not much more, performance), is a 42 year old strong woman who had married too early and went through life without falling in love. While shunning as delicately as possible the courting of a highly renowned and severely boring, cantor, she forms a friendship with, Yossi, a bachelor bus driver/ultimate loser who has lost hope of ever conjugating (let alone, wed) an actual woman.With Yossi as a refuge from the pretense of a strong willed woman, Rachel realizes the true nature of her friends, the frailty of their loyalty and worst of all, their obsession of sweeping unflattering phenomena under the carpet, even at the grave price of perpetuating it for posterity. The movie is well acted, credibly written and even manages to give the audience the atmosphere of the early 80's when Israelis had one TV channel to watch, one telephone company and a strong sense of patriotism that is disparaged and demonetized by too many these days.Which brings me to my question in the beginning of this review, should I, the secular guy (who identifies with Yossi the bus driver more than he wishes), should be offended when the religious society is presented in a very critical manner.The answer to that question is simple: when you are offended on behalf of a grown up group for being disparaged, you might be disparaging it yourself by deciding for them how they should feel.I feel, personally, that the director, Yosef Cedar (who grew up in a religious background but is pretty estranged to it, according to his own testimony) decided to "indict" his origins. As a result, the viewer is deprived from an unbiased impression of one of the most enigmatic, controversial and riveting sector in contemporary Israeli society.The movie won as best film in the Israeli Oscar competition and its victory was outshone by the fact that the movie "sof haolam smola" which was one of the most popular films in Israeli history, wasn't even nominated in any of the major categories.Unfair representation of "Sof haolam smola" in the Israeli Oscar robbed the movie of the buzz it could have generated. Also, the film's unfair representation of a certain sector in the Israeli society left me questioning its antagonism, rather than enjoy its undeniable qualities. Qualities it hones in abundance.8.5 out of 10 in my FilmOmeter.

I've just seen the second screening of this film at the berlinale.joseph cedar is hardly known at all in germany and so i thought i'd seen one of these first'n'nice-but-well... movies - and was caught off guard. the movie tell the story of three women (mother and two daughters) living in the israel of 1981.the mother is a widow since one year and the film shows how she and her daughters cope with the situation. so the story sounds simple but the mr. cedar has found a really good way of waving backgrounds around it. as there are the settlements-movement and the male dominated society. he really manages to give an impression of a society by showing people act and live in this society.one of the best movies i saw in months!!