Campfire portrays life in an Israeli settlement block as life in a submarine: strictly regimented, too narrow for privacy, and always at the point of implosion from incredible outside pressures. As a drama, the film is too untidy and tries too hard to broker international appeal with shallow comedy and romance. Whether or not it succeeds as an indictment of the settlement enterprise will depend entirely on the views you bring with you to the theater. But there's no question that director Joseph Cedar, a former resident of a West Bank settlement block, has no love lost for ultra-religious settlers chasing down the phantom dream of Eretz Israel, while never giving a thought to the butcher's bill.

Set in 1981, the film follows Rachel (Michaela Eshet) a 40-ish widow who latches onto Menachem Begin's expansion push for the tax breaks, thinking that it will be a mostly cost-free way to improve the living standards of her two teenage daughters. The elder daughter, Esti (Maya Maron), is sarcastic but a straight-arrow; the younger daughter, Tami (Hani Furstenberg) is more flighty and exploratory. The film's centerpiece is a sexual assault on Tami that occurs halfway through by a young settler soldier and his friends; it changes the dynamic of Rachel's relationship with the rest of her adopted community.

The reason to see the film is Maya Maron's subtle performance as the elder daughter; her experiences would have made for a more compelling story, rather than those of the adolescent Tami. I'm not sure if Maron speaks a word of English (the entire film is in subtitled Hebrew) but someone should jet her to Hollywood for a screen test immediately. She has sad eyes and an angular face that cuts well against the camera lens. It has to be said, however, that her performance in the movie is a happy stroke of luck for the director. She's almost entirely outside of the main plotline and sometimes even provides a welcome distraction from it. Hers is the only character that made me wonder what she would be doing in the present day, 24 years after the events of the film.

One interesting scene that occurs early is a big dancing-around-the-house-in-underwear number that takes place in the family home. This is the kind of scene that probably couldn't be done with a straight face in an American movie anymore; it would have to be the set-up for some kind of gross parody. Here it's played entirely straight. Alone in the house, Tami puts on some Israeli 80s dance-pop and skedaddles around the living room as the star of her own music video for several minutes of screen time. It's obviously an attempt for director Cedar to keep things light as long as possible and to provide some broad comedy, but the most I can say is that it's....interesting. Is Risky Business a hot DVD rental in Judea and Samaria? Someone should check into that.

The dancing scene serves as a stark contrast to the sexual assault scene that comes later - both focus on Tami and both seem to suggest her lack of interest in the reality around her. Did director Cedar mean for this contrast to be so stark? Is he trying to play up the idea of drowning oneself in entertainment in order to relieve the pressures of life in the West Bank? It's hard to say. If he's trying to draw parallels about the childishness of the settlers as a whole, it's too subtle to pick up on. The audience I saw the film with accepted the dancing scene at face value, as a window on a child's goofing around.

The sexual assault that bridges the first act of the film to the third act is not told in a satisfactory style, which is a big problem for the film as a whole. The scene doesn't need to be a flashy, Rashomon-disco ball drawing attention to itself, but it does need to be of a piece with the rest of the film. Instead, it raises questions about the girl's own culpability in the attack which seem out of place, even for 1981. Could these people really believe that she's to blame? There's also very little payoff to be had, since it's clear from the start of the film that the family is a square peg and will never fit into the settler way of life. We don't need a violent rupture to un-thread ties that haven't really formed in the first place.

We also don't need to see these events almost exclusively through the eyes of the mother. Her plight isn't as compelling as that of her daughters. She divides her time between settler group rituals and the dating scene, until she settles on a 60-ish bus driver named Yossi. Believe it or not, I think Yossi is supposed to represent freedom in the film, since he doesn't buy into the piffle of his messianic passengers. Is freedom just another word for driving a big bus in the West Bank for a living? I don't think so. His character gets too much screen time. I would have preferred the film to relegate Rachel's quest for happiness to the background and make it a story that focuses on the young people. They are the ones required to do the compulsory military service, after all, and they are the ones planning out futures in a country increasingly less concerned with dancing.