Author: Marko Attila Hoare
Uploaded: Thursday, 08 March, 2012
Spirited review of a film that has aroused considerable controversy, concluding that it is 'a splendid film; possibly the best yet made about the Bosnian war'.
In the Land of Blood and Honey, Angelina Jolie’s directorial debut, is difficult to watch. Difficult to watch in the sense that, here in the UK, it hasn’t been released, and there doesn’t appear to be any information about when or where it will be – certainly not on the movie’s official website, nor in any of the reviews that have appeared in UK newspapers. I spent the first three days of this week in Washington DC, where I found that the film was no longer playing in that city either, and that Amazon.com would not sell me the download since my debit card had a UK address. I have now managed to see the film – unfortunately, only the English-language version – via a link posted by a friend on Facebook.
In the Land of Blood and Honey‘s
unavailability for viewing is odd, considering the widespread publicity
it has received, the controversy that has surrounded it and the fame
and popularity of the director. But not odd, when you consider that it
violates just about every principle of Hollywood film-making, and that
if everyone as famous as Jolie were to make their films like this, it
would amount to a global cultural revolution. It is difficult to express
just how surprising it is to watch a film about an inter-ethnic love
story in time of conflict that makes no concession to either cinematic
or romantic cliche. Apparently, mainstream global audiences can only be
fed films like Dances with Wolves, involving the standard American hero and almost complete absence of ambiguity or nuance; or Monster’s Ball, involving a boringly predictable romance for which themes of racism are mere window-dressing; or Avatar, with its vomit-inducing, patronising liberal gushing over imagined noble savages.
In the Land of Blood and Honey is
not like any of these. The film centres on a relationship, in a Serb
concentration-camp during the Bosnian war of 1992-1995, between a
Bosniak woman-prisoner and a Serb military captain. This much is known
to anyone who has followed the controversy surrounding the film, whose
production in Bosnia was halted for a while due to local complaints that
it romanticised the relationship between Serb rapists and Bosniak women
prisoners. In fact – and this review contains no spoilers – the
relationship portrayed here is not the cliche of true love in the face
of adversity. Nor is it lurid, pornographic or sado-masochistic. In
fact, it is convincing in its portrayal of what such a relationship in
such circumstances might actually be like, involving as it does a
fledgling romance that was interrupted by the outbreak of war, then
resumed under very different circumstances in the concentration camp.
The film brutally portrays the enforced tension between, on the one
hand, the genuine attraction and emotional affinity between the two main
characters, Ajla and Danijel - portrayed respectively by Zana
Marjanovic and Goran Kostic - and the obscene imbalance of power between
them. The relationship is alternately, indeed simultaneously touching
and menacing. Whereas Ajla’s attraction to Danijel is unambiguous, her
sexual consent is not; the genuine tenderness of the love scenes occurs
only in the context of her absolute lack of choice in the matter and
terrifying dependency on him for her survival. Meanwhile, the
conflicted, unstable Danijel veers between chivalry and brutality,
keeping the viewer guessing right to the last minute as to how the
love-story and the film will end.
Jolie
has avoided the annoying habit of Hollywood movies – and indeed movies
generally – of sparing audiences uncomfortable ethical confusion by
making the involved rights and wrongs safely black-and-white, so that
heroes are implausibly noble and villains implausibly wicked. Neither
has she spared the audience anything, in terms of depicting the horrors
of the Bosnian war; the systematic rape, killing and humiliation of
Bosniaks are vividly shown. Nor does her heroine, Ajla, get off lightly
(in the long-established tradition epitomised by Captain Kirk, who is
always spared serious violence or humiliation no matter how many
expendable officers of the USS Enterprise are bumped off on strange
planets). This is taut, harrowing viewing, made all the more so by the
plot’s sheer unpredictability.
Nor,
however, are the horrors and violence portrayed here of the comic-book,
caricatured variety. Inevitably, this film has come under fire from the
Great Serb, genocide-denying lobby for supposedly being ‘anti-Serb’,
and portraying ‘the Serbs’ as monsters. Well, it is ‘anti-Serb’ in the
same way that films like Schindler’s List or The Pianist are
‘anti-German’. In fact, Danijel is far from an unambiguous villain in
the vein of Amon Goeth, the psychopathic camp-commander in Schindler’s List,
who also falls in love with one of his camp inmates. Nor is he a noble,
romantic hero trapped on the wrong side of a conflict – far from it.
The ambiguity of his character is one of the film’s great strengths; the
emotional and ethical dilemmas he faces convey realistically the
dilemma faced by many ordinary Serbs who were not a priori extreme
nationalists or Muslim-haters, but became complicit in the genocide
nonetheless. But because he is the protagonist of the film, the viewer,
too, becomes complicit in the dilemmas and ambiguities surrounding him;
when he goes into battle with Bosnian Army soldiers, our sympathies are
divided. We do not know whether he can or should trust Ajla, or more to
the point, whether she should trust and be loyal to him. The thin line
between closeness and enmity across the ethnic and military divide that
forms the theme of many films about the Bosnian war – No Man’s Land, Lepa sela lepo gore - has never been more harshly depicted than it is here.
Likewise,
the cruelty of the Serb soldiers and guards is portrayed graphically
but realistically – in a manner that compares favourably, for example,
with the caricatured evil of the Vietcong guerrillas in The Deer Hunter, or of the IRA guerrillas in The Crying Game. The realism of this portrayal is more comparable to that of the portrayal of Italian-American mafiosi in The Sopranos, or of high-ranking Nazis in Downfall or in Conspiracy - evil neither caricatured nor prettified, but humanised.
In
fact, one of the strengths of Jolie’s film is that it portrays the
cruelty of the Serb soldiers and guards not as stemming from any
supposed inherent wickedness of Serbs as people, but rather from the
systematic, institutionalised policy of persecution and killing that
actually took place; she shows that this was an organised genocide.
Furthermore, without any pretence of moral equivalency between Serb
perpetrators and Bosniak victims, the film nevertheless permits the Serb
ethnic-cleansers to present their own viewpoint – above all through the
mouth of Danijel’s father, General Nebojsa Vukojevic, portrayed by the
veteran Croatian Serb actor Rade Serbedzija.
Herein
lies one of the film’s few – minor – flaws: though Serbedzija’s
performance, like those of the other stars, is excellent, a couple of
the little speeches his character gives that serve to illustrate the
Serb-nationalist viewpoint sound somewhat unrealistic. Thus, early in
the film, General Vukojevic tells his son of the Serbs’ historic heroism
in resisting and defeating first the Ottomans, then the
Austro-Hungarians, then the Nazis – it is part of the
nationalist-historical catechism that Serbs are indeed likely to relate
to Western visitors, but a general would be unlikely to feel the need to
tell something so elementary to a captain. Likewise, toward the end of
the film, General Vukojevic tells his troops that they will, like Prince
Lazar – the legendary Serb hero of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo – reject
the earthly kingdom in favour of the heavenly kingdom, and refuse to
negotiate their own climb-down with the international community; though
this self-destructive, bloody-minded mentality has indeed been a
characteristic of contemporary Serb nationalism, it is unlikely that a
Serb general would have vocalised it quite so explicitly.
Another
wrong note is struck by the church building that appears toward the end
of the film; actually located in Budapest, where much of the filming
occurred, it looks out of place in Bosnia. Finally, in the
English-language version of the film at least, there simply isn’t enough
swearing to make the dialogue sound entirely authentic.
That
said, Jolie clearly bothered to study the war properly, and avoids the
cliches about it as successfully as she avoids general cinematic
cliches. So the film is not patronising; it does not depict Bosnia, its
people or its war – as is so often the case in Western portrayals – as
colourful but ridiculous; they are not seen through the eyes of some
well-meaning but ignorant and self-important foreign visitor. Indeed, it
is refreshing to watch a film about Bosnia in which there are no
Western or international characters whatsoever.
As indicated above, In the Land of Blood and Honey has
fallen foul both of Bosniaks who wrongly jumped to the conclusion that
it was misrepresenting or sanitising the Serb forces’ rape and ethnic
cleansing, and of Serb nationalists who have equally wrongly labelled it
as ‘anti-Serb’. But perhaps the most powerful constituency that it has
offended is the smug, sexist constituency that feels threatened by the
possibility that a young, attractive female superstar might produce a
film so intelligent, hard-hitting and technically near-flawless. Well,
she has. This is a splendid film; possibly the best yet made about the
Bosnian war. It should be watched and appreciated even by those not
specially interested in the subject.
