Zana Marjanovic in In the Land of Blood and HoneyPhoto: Dean Semler/ Courtesy of FilmDistrict and GK Films
She’s making her feature filmmaking debut with In the Land of Blood and Honey, and to be honest, I dreaded it. Not only is this love story set during the Bosnian civil war of the early 1990s, a period of genuinely ghastly violence, but Jolie didn’t shoot it in English—we read the Bosnian dialogue in subtitles. All of which made me fear that this was one of those too-earnest, socially conscious movies you expect from well-meaning Hollywood liberals. In fact, I was wrong. Yes, Jolie’s film is earnest and, yes, it’s socially conscious, and, no, it isn’t complex enough. But it’s also an impressive piece of work—and I’m not grading it on some special movie-star curve. It’s a heckuva lot more honest about evil than The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
The action takes place in and around Sarajevo, the famously multicultural city that, during the messy breakup of the former Yugoslavia, became a battleground between the Serbian-controlled government and ethnic Muslims. The story centers on two people who meet at a nightclub before the war: lovely, dark Ajla (Zana Marjanovic), a Bosnian Muslim portrait painter who lives with her sister, and Danijel (Goran Kostic), a cop whose father Nebojsa Vukojevich (Rade Serbedzija) is a fanatically pro-Serbian general. Ajla and Danijel clearly have eyes for each other, but politics intervene: When the Serbian army takes over the city, Ajla is rounded up. She’s about to be publicly raped by a soldier when Danijel, now an officer, intervenes to take her under his protection. And so this Serbian man and Bosnian Muslim woman begin what you might hear called a Romeo and Juliet story, but it’s actually something more interesting. You see, Jolie not only follows this couple’s shifting feelings toward each another over the years—emotions that range from sexual ecstasy to stabbing mistrust to a furious sense of betrayal—but uses them to show what happens to decent people caught up in an indecent situation. Neither Ajla nor Danijel believes in the civil war—they don’t hate the other side—but gradually the historical tragedy that unfolds between them begins eating away at their tolerance.
If this sounds a bit schematic, it is, and I found myself wishing that Jolie’s script had more depth and variation; after a while, the movie begins to feel a tad repetitive both in its endless atrocities and the cloistered meetings beween Ajla and Danijel. That said, Jolie turns out to be a startlingly effective director. For starters, she does a terrific job with her actors, drawing on Serbedzija’s vainglory to win to create a shrewd portrait of a general who’s convinced himself that genocidal murder is actually justice. And she does even better with her lovers. Even as Danijel gives us a man buffeted by obvious emotions—desire, shame, fear of his old man—Marjanovic offers a performance of quiet subtlety, warily registering every nuance of her lover’s face as if her life’s depending on it, which, of course, it is.
It’s part of Jolie’s image that she’s a tough cookie, and that certainly comes out in her handling of the war, the churning ocean in which everyone must swim. Getting sharp, visceral work from the great Australian cinematographer Dean Semler, she offers an unflinching look at a shredded country so violent that babies get flung from balconies, snipers howl with delight when they pop off old folks scrounging for food, and captive women exist to be raped for sport—while their fellow female captives look on, unable to do anything knowing they will be next. This is disturbing stuff, and Jolie depicts it so vividly that the effects are paradoxical: The more skillfully she stages such scenes, the less you want to see them. I admire Jolie for being unafraid to remind us that this barbarism is precisely what happened in 90s Bosnia (nobody wanted to watch it back then either) yet I also suspect that here’s a case where less would surely be more. As the bird says in that old T. S. Eliot poem, “Humankind cannot bear too much reality.”
