Movies into Film

Campfire

Directed by Joseph Cedar

Israel, 2004

Blind date: Michaela Eshet, on the left, in Campfire (Photo courtesy of campfiremovie.com)

“Tell them Dad’s not home,” a 40ish mother instructs one of her teenage daughters when potential buyers come to call for her late husband’s pale blue Peugeot, which sits parked in the driveway with a for sale sign. “They don’t need to know I’m a widow.”

The daughter does her part in this roundabout method of selling the car, and the interested parties disappear. That’s how the writer-director Joseph Cedar begins Campfire, a movie that takes place in Jerusalem during—for no discernible reason—the year 1981.

In a later variation on the same pretense, Tami, the younger daughter, answers the phone, and calls out “Dad?” for a few minutes, then, “Mom, is he here?” There’s the suggestion that the filmmaker may be up to something insightful. This reluctance to sell the dead man’s car masks the real problem: how are Rachel (the mother) and her offspring adapting to life without him? After a while, Esti, the older sister, shouts Tami off the phone with, “It isn’t funny anymore,” and that raises the question—was the ruse ever funny? And if it was, what does that say about their father, dead only a year? Not much.

Well, never mind, because Cedar hasn’t thought anything through. If the film’s publicity didn’t remind us of the story’s setting in the early 80s, we’d never know, as Cedar explores neither the historical nor pop-cultural contexts of the era.

He’s cast a good actress, Michaela Eshet, as the widowed mother. She has a deeply furrowed brow, yet her wide smile still bears traces of youthfulness. When she lies awake in bed at night, listening to the sounds of Esti trying to keep her trysts with a young soldier quiet, Eshet minimally conveys Rachel’s vast loneliness.

Hani Furstenberg and assailant in Campfire (Photo courtesy of campfiremovie.com)

The movie’s first serious misstep happens on the morning after: Rachel (out of jealousy? a perverse sense of discipline?) takes a hammer to Esti’s bedroom door, which is made of glass rather than wood. Rachel shatters the top pane and Esti’s privacy along with it. This random destruction doesn’t stem from anything we’ve seen in the mother’s character—it’s just an effect that Cedar wants to push through, stupid and untrue to life.

From that moment on, nearly everything sputters in Campfire, and the writer-director’s shortcomings balloon to immense proportions. No one in the cast could be a called a beauty; Cedar’s harsh lens, emphasizing the grotesqueness of individual faces, gives none of them a chance.

As Tami, Hani Furstenberg has the exaggerated high cheekbones, cartoonishly full lips, and widely spaced teeth of a Mad Magazine caricature. Her ears stick out, in Dumbo-like extravagance, and the director piles it high with Tami’s need to be loved: a close-up of the girl kissing her reflection in a mirror is positively sickening.

Cedar gives Rachel two blind dates: one with a self-pitying minibus driver, a man still uncertain of himself at age 50, the other with an arrogant, crag-faced cantor who nonetheless has a fine singing voice. In another juxtaposition, wayward teenage boys gather round a campfire to sing bawdy songs; inside, the adults, all prospective members of a proposed new settlement in the West Bank, one that Rachel wants desperately to join, solemnly sing hymns to Zion. The cuts between the two are slightly funny, then there’s a long, tedious sequence of Tami’s semi-rape by the Israeli equivalent of Nazi youth.

In the Jerusalem Post, Hanna Brown writes of this scene: “She is infatuated with one of [the boys], and it isn’t clear how we should interpret his passivity at crucial moments or Tami’s continued interest in him after the incident.” One of the very few elements of Campfire that rings vaguely true is that Tami would still harbor an attraction to her friend Rafi (played by Oshri Cohen, a lad who does have a smattering of sex appeal) even after his friends degrade her, even after he ditheringly fails to protect her—and that Tami, given the time to recover, wouldn’t be shy about letting him know. As for “it isn’t clear how we should interpret his passivity,” has Brown spent so little time around adolescent boys that she doesn’t comprehend herd behavior? Also, a director’s job isn’t to make “interpretations” clear; that is what dumb critics are supposed to do. – NPT

April 29, 2005

Movies into Film

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