Campfire (2004)

Joseph Cedar’s Campfire takes the 2004 perspective on the West Bank settlements as they were approached in 1981. Hindsight exposes the ostensible idealism behind the settlement movement as a violent, aggressive macho strut.

The foreground story of a one-year widow Rachel, her sexually active and angry daughter Esti and her blossoming teen Tami (who narrates), reflects upon the background story of an ideologically based new settlement planned for the windy desert near Ramallah. Seeking some assurance of community, Rachel is determined to move with her daughters to that settlement, despite its committee’s reluctance to admit a manless family who can’t contribute to the guard duties. Only Rachel’s long friendship with the commune’s chief Motkeh’s wife gains her even tentative acceptance.

The high-blown principles of the settlement are exposed by Motkeh’s callous response to Tami’s sexual assault at the festival bonfire. The rough, vicious boys and Motkeh’s own hypocritical son reveal a lawlessness and macho bullying underneath the settlement’s pretences. That confirms the film’s first theme, the vulnerability of women, from Rachel hiding her husband’s death from potential car-buyers, to the settlement committee’s doubts about her, to the boys’ abuse of Tami, which moves from verbal to physical and back to the verbal slander of the graffiti. 

The arid macho wind of the settlement — in men and boys alike — contrasts to the softness of the bus driver Yossi, who admits to Rachel he’s a virgin and to Tami that he may lack what it takes ever to marry. When he takes Rachel on a dinner date in his empty bus it’s an emblem of a community resource, awaiting fulfilment. His use of his job on a date improves from the contrast to the cantor’s burst of Kol Nidrei on the hotel steps on his first date with Rachel.

With all the men in kipahs Cedar frames out the secular Israel. This film is about the religious aspirants and their suspect attitude toward the isolation and loss among its citizenry. In both the cantor’s Kol Nidrei and his choral lead bemoaning the people’s pathetic condition, viewed from the heavens, the vanity of the singer swamps the submission of the song. Hence the poetic justice when he steps in the cow dung on the settlement’s tour with Yossi. So, too, the military’s representation by two soldiers, Esti’s uniformed beau, who shows respect for her mother and accepts Esti’s restraints, and the out-of-uniform boor who has no friends his own age so hangs out with the young boys and violates Tami. Any man’s army is ambivalent like that.  
     Despite Motkeh’s communitarian pretensions and the cantor’s false modesty and religious pretences, the effective hero is Yossi. He immediately appreciates Rachel more deeply than even her long-term friends do. He means his offer of a bus ride whenever she needs, no strings attached. He’s comfortable with her daughters but feels no need to impress them. As he revives the family’s dead battery, he restores Rachel’s warmth and openness and in general provides a humanity and respect the settlement organizers lack. In the last scene the bus driver sits with Tami in the back seat while Esti drives the family car, her mother at her side. Yossi’s unpretentious service is the film’s dominant value. A modest but sincere personal commitment trumps the more problematic claims of the organized new community.