Review: ‘In the Land of Blood and Honey’ Delivers a New Director to Watch in Angelina Jolie goo.gl/fb/cBAcx
Review: ‘In the Land of Blood and Honey’ Delivers a New Director to Watch in Angelina Jolie
Movie Review By Robert Levin on December 29, 2011 |
On the surface, In the Land of Blood and Honey seems like a vanity project of sorts for its maker, Angelina Jolie. After all, the actress/humanitarian/super-mom is one of the few figures in Hollywood who could strive to make a Bosnian War-set Romeo and Juliet with subtitles and actually get it done.
Yet the finished project suggests that we might have found a new director to watch. Jolie brings a sincere, serious vision to this ambitious enterprise. Crafted with a veteran’s skill, the film ably traverses a range of emotions, from the intimate warmth of bedside scenes to the cold, calculated brutality of war at its most horrific.
Shooting mostly in Hungary but working with an all-Bosnian cast, Jolie brings alive the terrible, destructive ethnic conflict that erupted between 1992 and 1995, after the former Yugoslavia split apart. Her narrative imparts the conflict’s heartaches through its focus on the forbidden, strife-ridden romance between Ajla (Zana Marjanovic), a Muslim artist, and Serbian policeman Danijel (Goran Kostic).
If you’re going to take on such a highly charged subject, you’ve got to go all the way with it. Jolie doesn’t shy from its challenges. She’s unafraid of difficult, uncompromising set pieces, offering an unflinching depiction of wanton criminality. Ajla is taken prisoner and subjected to considerable indignities and abuses along with her fellow Muslims. The violence is sudden and explosive, and Jolie always stresses its human cost. In one harrowing scene, for example, the Serbian officers use the Muslim prisoners as shields.
It’s a testament to the strength of Jolie’s craft that the taboo relationship at the picture’s core is interwoven into the wartime fabric without seeming like a superfluous cop out. Though Ajla and Danijel enjoy small moments of happiness — in bed, say, or when they visit an abandoned art gallery — the movie stresses the impossibility of their romance. Submerged within each scene shared by the main characters is the sense that they just can’t work. Matters of the heart can’t compete with the pull of familial and nationalist ties, or an atmosphere rife with wanton, casual hatred.
The actors affect a convincing bond while simultaneously subverting it. They’re genuine in their declarations of love for one another, and the opening scene — in which they seem blissfully happy dancing in a disco, until a bomb destroys it — makes it clear that at another time, in another place, things might have worked.
But their scenes together are defined by Ajla’s submissiveness and Danijel’s sadness, as if both characters are consumed by the realization that broader forces will drive them apart for good. The characters want to shut out the chaos surrounding them by escaping in each other’s arms, but they’re never able to do so. Even during the most tender of scenes, Jolie and her actors never let you forget the horrors looming outside the bedroom door. That — as much as any of the gritty, realistic depictions of violence — drives home the tragedy of war in this assured cinematic debut.
The Upside: Angelina Jolie shows that she is an accomplished director, with a keen visual eye and strong sense of thematically consistent storytelling.
The Downside: At times, the film feels a bit too familiar.
On the Side: The film is, as The Wall Street Journal notes, “a tough sell,” but it’s well worth your time, even if you’re rightfully skeptical about the whole thing.
Angelina Jolie's directorial debut 'In the Land of Blood and Honey' is complex and scattered, but shakes us: bitly.com/u3xxQo
In the Land of Blood and Honey
Zana Marjanovic
Directed by Angelina Jolie
Rolling Stone:
**1/2 out of 4 star rating
December 29, 2011
Poor Angelina Jolie.
Before you can sit down and examine the film that marks her debut as a
director – a love-hate story set during the 1990s Bosnian War – you must
deal with the bricks being thrown at her. During shooting, the Bosnian
Women Victims of War Association protested – as well it might – the idea
of a film about a Bosnian woman who falls in love with her Serbian
rapist. In the Land of Blood and Honey is not that film.
Serbian commander Danijel (Goran Kostić) had already been involved with
the Muslim Ajla (Zana Marjanović) before the war started. Their affair
continues in the camp that Danijel oversees. I can't speak to the
copyright-infringement suit brought against Jolie by Croatian author
James J. Braddock. But I do know that Jolie does not use the brutal rape
camps as a background for forbidden romance. In the Land of Blood and Honey
wants to lay the truth out there, about the women assaulted and the men
slaughtered. What we see of America is mostly the blind eye it shows to
the atrocities. To quote then-Secretary of State James Baker, "We got
no dog in this fight." Well, Jolie is at war with that kind of
indifference. At times, Jolie rises to the pulpit when she should stay
on the ground. Her theme is too complex for her scattered screenplay to
encompass. It's as a director that Jolie shines. She gets strong,
stinging performances from Kostić and Marjanović. The sexual power plays
between their characters barely mask a blood feud that spans the ages.
Jolie has a keen eye for the core of a scene and a true director's
instinct for the pulse that defines character. Her live-wire movie is
out to shake us. That it does.
AMPAS Member
Ken Rudolph
*** 1/4 (B+)IN THE LAND OF BLOOD AND HONEY (d. Angelina Jolie) V. Romeo & Juliette Bosnian war story, nicely underplayed and well directed. *** 1/4
