Review of Campfire (2004) by Edith N — 02 Apr 2012

This is one of those films you'll have to go out of your way to find, if you're interested, but it's well worth it. It's brought to us poor, deprived Americans by the same distribution company that brought us [i]OT: Our Town[/i], which I reviewed nearly a year ago.

This is an Israeli movie, so I think I'm probably missing some of the cultural connotation. I know that I don't know what any of the writing anywhere in the movie says, because it's in Hebrew, which I neither speak nor read. I understand that many of the performers are better known in Israel; one of the actors is in [i]Munich[/i] and one of the girls was on [i]CSI[/i] once, but that's practically all I even recongize in anyone's filmographies.

Rachel Gerlik is a widow with two teenage daughters, Tami and Esti. She's trying to get a place in a religious settlement in the West Bank. Her place is in doubt because she isn't married. Which is okay with her daughters, because they don't want to go anyway. Her friends are trying to set her up--probably in part because they don't want to accommodate a widow in the settlement.

Esti, the elder daughter, is increasingly wild. She wants to escape the family, but upon her father's death, she no longer felt she could. Tami wants desperately to fit in, but she doesn't. She's a weirdo, and not even one of the cool weirdoes. And then one night, she leaves the "official" bonfire of the youth group and joins the unofficial one a bunch of boys are having.

What happens to Tami and how it affects the rest of the family takes up the rest of the film, and I don't want to give that part of it away--not least because exact details are left unclear. But I will say that Rachel is, as accused at one point, [i]incredibly[/i] selfish. When she discovers that something--she does not know what--has happened to her daughter, she is more concerned that her daughter doesn't love her than that Tami might be hurt.

It's a remarkable contrast between this film and [i]Spider-Man 3[/i]. This is a quieter film, and its story is told far better. If a fifth of the people who go to see [i]Spider-Man[/i] just today have even heard of this one, I will be greatly surprised. However, it's a superior film well worth tracking down. The Timberland Regional Library system has it, as does Netflix.