Few thoughts on In the Land of Blood and Honey

Rating: 8/10 (12 April 2012)

On acting. Howard Feinstein said in his review for Daily Screen that "... one selling point could be the foregrounding of an outstanding portrayal of a Bosnian Serb camp commander and civilian cop, Danijel, by the Bosnian Serb actor Goran Kostic, despite the sometimes ludicrous plot situations into which he is thrust. His physical agility, soft but masculine face, piercing blue eyes, and remarkable capacity to shift moods in a split second recall a younger Ralph Fiennes..." I respectfully disagree. Even assuming that some of the plot situations are ludicrous, I think that Kostic makes them even more ludicrous by his remarkably unconvincing performance. It didn't really matter whether he was hanging out with his comrades, developing his supposedly amorous relationship with Ajla, which in reality is nothing more than sexual slavery, or just being an obedient son to his bigoted father who happens to be the army general, it was flat and extremely lame, even on the most basic level of making it believable to the viewer. Now, even if Jolie the scriptwriter intended to emasculate the camp commander and empower the victim, which I think she did, he sabotaged it all the way. I failed to detect shifts in his moods from the moments when he was recreating the bygone times pretending to love and protect her to those when he hated her guts simply for not being of his own kind or for suspecting her loyalty. For me, Kostic's portrayal of Danijel's split-second transformation from a seemingly protective and affectionate to selfish and outright aggressive self in his dealings with Ajla, his alternatively authoritative and submissive personality in the rapport with his men and his father respectively is just pathetic. Yet, nowhere is his hugely unimpressive performance more exposed than in the movie's final scene, which, to be fair to Howard, is lost on the foreign viewer watching the English version of the film or the one in the Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian language with English subtitles. Finally, if any of the lead actors in this movie deserves praise for outstanding portrayal of her character, it is Zana Marjanovic, who, similarly to Natasa Petrovic in another recent movie on the subject of sexual violence during the war, Juanita Wilson's As If I Am Not There, delivers a solid performance. If these two movies, and Tanovic's Circus Columbia with Jelena Stupljanin in it, are anything to go by, young female acting talent in the Balkans is much superior and seems to be ahead of the game compared to their male colleagues.
On insistence on sticking to historical facts on film. Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds is a good example. Responding to the critics who slammed the movie as trivialization of Holocaust, shallow propaganda, caricature of a gruesome war, the movie that promotes terrorism and torture, a fantasy that, if it were to be indulged at the expense of the truth of history, would be the most inglorious bastardization of all, Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of Simon Wisenthal Center said: "Jews have to recognize that Hollywood is in the entertainment business, and they have a right to entertain their audience. It's presumptuous for us to become the czars that tell the entertainment community what kinds of films they can make." Tarantino for his part said: "I'm telling you it's fairy tale right at the top... Whoever gets it, gets it: whoever doesn't, I don't give a damn." Yet, in spite of it being a fantasy, a fairy tale that starts off with once upon a time, it is more than just that, at least judging by the experience of actors who participated in the making of this movie. Melanie Laurent, French actress who plays the character of Shosanna described her experience in the following words: "I'm Jewish. I read the script together with my grandfather and he told me: 'You have to make that movie, please.' So, it was not just for me, it was for my family. And when he (Tarantino) picked me, I'm the face of the Jewish vengeance. I'm sure my grandfather will love the movie."
On resistance to giving a human face to the enemy. Giving human face to suicide bombers on the screen did not win Hany Abu-Assad, the director of 2005 film Paradise Now many fans. On the contrary, he was faced with a barrage of attacks from day one of the filming. During the filming one of the Palestinian factions acted on a rumor that the movie was anti-suicide bombers and they kidnapped the movie's local location manager and demanded that the film's crew leave Nablus. Owing to the movie's huge success, Golden Globe award and Oscar nomination in the best foreign film category, critiques started coming from the other side of the border too. In her comment on the supposedly anti-Semitic character of the film Irit Linor wrote: "... And so we can rightly call 'Paradise Now' a Nazi film: it spins a thin thread of understanding for those who resorted to desperate measures to solve the problem of the constant, unremitting evil of the Jews..." Fed up with these and similar attacks coming from both camps, in response to the question about the message he wanted to communicate through this film. Hany Abu-Assad said: "I don't have messages in movies, messages I leave for the postman."
A concluding thought. For starters, it would be good if we could at least try and see these movies, regardless of whether they are brilliant or flawed, more from the artistic point of view, more as a human thing. The alternative is to wonder why Lubna Azabal's character Suha in Paradise Now did not speak with a Palestinian accent, why Cristoph Waltz's Jew Hunter in Inglorious Basterds is a multidimensional character who speaks several languages, or why those sniping and shelling the city of Sarajevo in In the Land of Blood and Honey had to have such evil grins on their faces.