In all her promos she has been hammering home her point that she made the film in hopes of starting a dialogue and to encourage respect for the Bosnian people. She has also said that the film was intentionally made to be difficult to watch so people could understand what it feels to go through war. While I didn't find it any more difficult than other films dealing with the Holocaust, her desire to spread her message to a wide audience is at cross-purposes with her intent to make them feel uncomfortable. She could probably have also helped her film more if she spent a bit more time talking about the actual story she presents instead of always dwelling on her cast and her political goals. After all, as she said, she made a fictional love story and not a documentary and her story is a complex one that she could benefit from further explanation.
In the Land of Blood and Honey
A ver es mez foldjen
Though sufficiently well made to suggest a viable career behind the camera for debutante writer-director Angelina Jolie, "In the Land of Blood and Honey" seems to spring less from artistic conviction than from an over-earnest humanitarian impulse. Centered around the sexually charged bond between two people on different sides of the Bosnian War, this alternately disturbing and titillating picture reps a dramatically misguided attempt to renew public awareness of the 1992-95 Balkan conflict. Jolie's name and do-gooder cachet should lend the film a modest commercial profile, though its horrors-of-war hand-wringing will do little to challenge the apathy of the mainstream.There have been a number of films made about Westerners caught up in war-torn Bosnia-Herzegovina, including "Welcome to Sarajevo," "Behind Enemy Lines" and "The Hunting Party." Foregoing the customary narrative assist of an American or British outsider's perspective, Jolie plunges directly into a local story filmed with actors from the former Yugoslavia speaking the Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian language (an English-lingo version was also lensed for exhibition in other territories), a move that immediately signals the helmer's seriousness and lends the film a measure of cultural authenticity.
Yet that credibility doesn't extend to the particulars of the drama, which is too strenuously designed to make viewers cluck their tongues at the pointlessness and absurdity of any conflict along ethnic or religious lines. Opening titles inform us of how diverse Bosnia-Herzegovina used to be, with Muslims and Christians, Serbs and Croats coexisting peacefully before the outbreak of war in 1992, triggered by the republic's declaration of independence from Yugoslavia.
Sudden twists of fate are the script's chief structuring device. Ajla (Zana Marjanovic), an attractive Muslim artist living in Sarajevo, meets Serb cop Danijel (Goran Kostic) at a nightclub one evening, but their mutual attraction is waylaid by a bomb blast. Four months later, when the Yugoslav-backed Serb army occupies the city and begins a horrific campaign of ethnic cleansing, irony once more rears its head: Danijel, serving in the Serbian army, recognizes Ajla among the numerous prisoners, and saves her from being raped by another officer. (Another woman, we're shown in unsparing closeup, isn't so lucky.)
Over the following months, Danijel maintains an uneasily protective watch over Ajla, arranging private meetings in which she regards him with distrust and wary gratitude. Eventually Danijel installs her in her own private quarters where the two can make love and Ajla can paint in peace, away from the harassment and abuse of the other guards. This risky move arouses the suspicion of Gen. Nebojsa Vukojevich (Rade Serbedzija), who occasionally rationalizes his troops' actions (and slips the audience a historical cheat sheet) with lines like, "This land is soaked in Serb blood."
Another character more aptly pinpoints the film's theme by announcing, "People are not often what you think them to be." It's a bid for sympathy on behalf of Danijel, who, one is meant to believe, is a sensitive guy deep down, despite having been thrust into a position of murderous authority by his domineering dad. At times Danijel seems a somewhat more benign version of Ralph Fiennes' Nazi in "Schindler's List," testing the limits of his affection for his personal refugee/plaything while using the refugees scurrying below his window for target practice.
It would take an unusually sensitive touch to see the monster's inner humanity while still decrying the barbarism, or to turn a cross-cultural love story into a moral argument, and Jolie isn't quite there yet. At a certain point, the film almost seems to sense its scenario tilting into tarted-up banality and abruptly shifts gears, to shockingly blunt effect, yet the sudden pessimism feels as unearned as the earnest pleading.
The intimacy of Danijel and Ajla's scenes together, mostly shot in a large, bare-walled room, lends the production (filmed in Hungary and Bosnia-Herzegovina) the feel of an arty chamber drama rather than a full-on war picture. The pic tries to counter this with occasional televised dispatches from the outside world (newsflash: the U.N. is useless), continual references to mostly offscreen atrocities and occasional scenes of large-scale battle and pursuit; these include an action-oriented subplot involving Ajla's sister (Vanesa Glodjo) and a group of Muslim refugees. Jolie handles these logistically demanding scenes with grit and assurance, though there's a sense of overcalculation to some of the more disturbing images: a bullet whizzing out of nowhere to meet its target, or a besieged house going up in flames.
Thesps are fine but a bit colorless, and Marjanovic and Kostic don't seem entirely at home with their characters' fairly risible dynamic; Serbedzija, the cast's biggest name, also leaves its strongest impression. Gabriel Yared's score is tasteful.
In the Land of Blood and Honey: Film Review
The Bottom Line
Few will want to watch the Serbian war atrocities Angelina Jolie capably puts onscreen in her directorial debut.Writer-director Angelina Jolie presents a blunt and brutal look at genocide and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1990s.
It's clear within the first few minutes of In the Land of Blood and Honey, a blunt and brutal look at genocide and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1990s, that this is a serious piece of work and not simply a vanity project for its debuting writer-director, Angelina Jolie. But while the personal story at its core carries some nuanced shadings, this impressively mounted production gradually reveals itself first and foremost as a compendium of atrocities, a catalogue of pointless abuse and killings no one did much to stop for three years.
Eight years ago Jolie starred in a film, Beyond Borders, in which she sashayed around global hot spots in elegant outfits like a fashion model on a shoot. Almost as if in atonement, Blood and Honey is nothing like that, quite the contrary, in fact, as it centers on the queasy relationship between a captor, a Serbian army officer responsible for rounding up Muslims or otherwise making them disappear in Bosnia, and a female prisoner, a woman he was interested in prior to the war and is now able to exploit, but also protect, as his “personal property.”
A raucous opening scene in a dance hall suggests that blond, thirtysomething Danijel (Goran Kostic) is quite keen on dark-haired Aja (Zana Marjanovic), but that nothing has happened between them yet. Maybe it will this very night until, bang, the place is blown up. Four months later, unidentified troops charge into an apartment complex, separate the men out to be shot and herd the younger women onto a bus to be taken away to a place where they're all stuffed into a cramped room. One of them is raped in front of the others and Aja is next in line until Danijel steps in a spares her.
Audiences unversed in the politics of the era will scarcely know what to make of all this until Danijel's tough father Nebojsa (Rade Serbedzija), a senior Serbian officer who's seen it all, helpfully explains things. It was the Serbs, he self-justifyingly points out, who prevented the Turks from conquering Europe centuries ago and more recently stood up to Hitler; now, in 1992, it's their responsibility to turn out the Muslims before they take over.
It's easy to see that the crusty old bird suspects that his son may not be made of stern enough stuff to do what it takes. Conversely, Danijel knows he has something to prove, so even though he doesn't like the idea of killing people he grew up and went to school with, he gets on with the job. The men under his command show no such compunction, blowing up a Red Cross ambulance with as bazooka and picking off Muslims at every opportunity.
Under Danijel's protection, Aja doesn't have to worry nearly so much as the other women do about being randomly assaulted or murdered on a whim. It's inevitable she'll sooner or later have to submit to her subjugator, who's generally civil to her but at a moment's notice could throw her to the wolves if so motivated. But when she relents, he reciprocates by not only telling her she's got to run away but how she can escape.
At this point, as Danijel's responsibilities become more heinous and the action moves to Sarajevo in 1993, the barbarism is ratcheted up: Women are used as human shields, anyone darting through the streets is fair game for target practice, mutual suspicion and blame mount on all fronts and death becomes a way of life, to the point where all the characters have become numb and the viewer may have had enough, having long since gotten the point. Good drama has you anxious to know what's going to happen next; In the Land of Blood and Honey has you dreading to learn what atrocity awaits around the next corner.
It's no surprise, then, that nothing good comes of anything, at least until 1995, when United Nations choppers finally materialize in the skies above the ruins. The film's final line comes across as both quietly dramatic and highly unlikely.
Jolie deserves significant credit for creating such a powerfully oppressive atmosphere and staging the ghastly events so credibly, even if it is these very strengths that will make people not want to watch what's onscreen. All the director's decisions were taken in the interest of heightened verisimilitude, from working in the Bosnian language (an English-language version is available as well) to using as many authentic locations as possible (some in Bosnia, others in Hungary) and having cinematographer Dean Semler employ a combat-ready style.
The production was protested and kicked out of Sarajevo due to charges that the Serbs were uniquely being singled out for abuse; while some of the original detractors have withdrawn their criticisms, others have sprung up, and it would be surprising if such squabbles did not continue, regardless of accuracy.
Gabriel Yared's very effective score blends in some regional influences while working toward a low-key haunted feel.
Providing most of the film's nuance and subtlety is Marganovic, who keeps obvious emotions in check but closely registers the most minute changes in Danijel's attitudes and the temperature of conditions around her. Much as he might prefer it, Kostic's equivocal Danijel can't get away with being “the good Serb,” under such scrutiny is he from his father and the trigger-happy men under his command.
The title stems from the fact that, in reference to the Balkans, the Turkish word for honey is “bal” while the word for blood is “kan.”
