A beautiful rendition of an ugly little war...

Rating: Null/10 (14 March 2012)

Like most Americans, I hadn't known an awful lot about the former Yugoslavia before it broke up after the dictator died; I hadn't even known there was a big Muslim population there. When the "ethnic cleansing" was going on in the 1990's (that was the origin of that term, if I recall right) I marveled how a supposedly civilized world could still let all this horrible crap happen, but at least there were discussions what to do about it, which was more attention than the slaughter in Africa was getting around the same time. I remember at one point some women in Sarajevo put on a beauty contest to lure TV cameras to their situation, with a big banner reading PLEASE DON'T LET THEM KILL US. I sometimes wonder how many of them did survive.
Actress and humanitarian Angelina Jolie has put specific human faces on this nasty story. For her directorial debut she has reworked the classic "Romeo and Juliet" story with apparently a big influence from Roman Polanski's "The Pianist" (certainly well worth emulating). Before the hostilities commence, we see a Bosnian Muslim painter and a Serb soldier on a date in a nightclub; Jolie lets the scene play out a la Michael Cimino with the wedding sequence in "The Deer Hunter," ending with a bomb blast completely out of the blue a la "Children of Men." There's a jump forward and now the couple are forced into being enemies. To her credit, Jolie depicts the ensuing atrocities mostly from the victims' perspective, most of the victims being female. The painter endures her lot with stark stoicism, knowing a display of weakness would just invite more abuse. Some of the abuse is "just" psychological or even childish, as when a bunch of troops eating at a table keep dropping things on the floor for her to clean up. The panoply of man's inhumanity to woman is all the more compelling for being understated. Eventually the soldier stashes the painter in a house for her protection but finds himself torn by conflicting influences. The outcome was a real jolt for me, but in hindsight it should have seemed inevitable, so hats off to Jolie on both points. Wars pass and we forget body counts but I suspect I'll remember that woman's face for a long time. I'll also remember the moments of tenderness and even humor that Jolie allows us, which seems almost like mirages in the unrelenting desert of cruelty that's depicted.
Those seeking more of a "back story," a geopolitical examination of the situation in the former Yugoslavia, may be disappointed. We're just asked to accept the situation as it's presented to us. I think, though, that Jolie was right to stick to the story she wanted to tell rather than include scenes of UN negotiations or whatever. (The blue-helmeted "peace keepers" only appear briefly and ineffectually at the end, maybe that was Jolie's little editorial dig.) All the cast members are effective; I only recognized the guy who played "Boris the Blade" in "Snatch." The photography is that bleakly elegant kind so popular in modern war movies. I don't usually remember soundtracks afterward, but this one was very effective, maybe I'll try to get the CD. Available currently for $4.99 on Comcast on Demand, definitely worth a look. I understand that Jolie filmed this both in English and the local language at the same time; I saw the English version, would have preferred the local language with subtitles, but I know having to read those is torture for many Yanks. By the way, Hollywood studios used that multi-language technique a lot in the early days of talkies, making their actors do multiple movies for the price of one. Now that a silent flick has won the Oscar, I guess we can expect more such blasts from the past...