Symbolic and Very Raw

Rating: 10/10 (7 April 2012)

Watching this movie was hell. Which I suppose is a bad and a good thing. Bad because I allowed myself to sit in front of the screen for 2 hours and relive the pain. Good because Angelina Jolie did a pretty good job of filming this movie. I am still not quite certain what always brings Angelina back to Bosnia and her affinity for our people, but I am glad that she took such an interest in what happened because she is showing the world what happened. This movie has completely changed my opinion of her. Before watching this movie, I thought this would be more of a sappy twisted love story between a Bosnian woman and Serb man and the focus would be on them versus the actual events of the war. But no, what Angelina did was much smarter than that, much more symbolistic and representative of the actual war. I took plenty of notes during the movie because she made it a point to use symbolism to show you exactly what was happening in the war. She didn't need to explicitly tell you the messages she was trying to highlight. You could see them for yourself. Perhaps the Serbs picked up on this as well and that's why they didn't want to show this movie in their country, but either way the love story was just as much a part of the symbolism as was the actual depiction of the murders, rapes, and torturing of the people. The love story was actually not sappy and not a Hollywood plot of getting you to watch the film, rather it was a means of small-scaling the war for the viewer. By that I mean that she juxtaposed the generalities of what happened in the war with what happened in their relationship. If you told me that a Bosnian made this movie, it wouldn't have surprised me but the mere fact that an American actress did this who hasn't lived a day in the life of a Bosnian during the war, shows you how sheer genius her script really is. The movie starts out with the Bosnian Muslim woman and the Serb man dancing, enjoying one anothers company together in a seemingly carefree and enjoyable environment. Without a warning to them or the viewer, their scene together is bombed, ending their blissful fate together and separating them into the roles that the Serb army has dictated for them. The woman is hand picked along with other women to become the personal slaves of Serb soldiers at one of their camps, while the man is the son of one of the largest army leaders in the war and forced to be on the front lines. I wasn't sure if she was trying to insinuate that the father of the man was Ratko Mladic or not (their resemblance was uncanny) but I don't think that she meant that as her focus anyways. Bosnia started out the same way. Bosnian Muslims, Bosnian Serbs, and Bosnian Croats lived together in relative harmony before the war. These 'ethnic issues' that we talk about now were minimal and never enough to come close to even the idea of a war this size. The abrupt bombing of the harmonious scene between the two protagonists mirrors the ideas of Radovan Karadic and Radko Mladic firing up their army men and their quick destruction of Muslim towns. The film continues, showing the mass rapes of the women day in and day out by Serb soldiers. Watching these scenes was so hard that I had to stop the film a couple of times simply because I knew I couldn't watch them. I could literally feel my body being affected watching this movie because my heart started to pound for these women, I started to shake, and I couldn't breathe as I watched what happened to them. It's not like this was my first time watching a film about Bosnia. I've read, heard, and seen plenty of things about Bosnia to tell you all of the same facts that someone would whose actually lived it. The major difference, though, is that I haven't lived it and whenever I watch these rapes, killings, and torturings happen, I just can't even function. I feel numb. I feel like all of my insides have turned to ice. I feel like I'm watching this outside of my body. The war in Bosnia was actually the first was where sexual crimes against women were legally considered a war crime in the Hague and international courts of law. Angelina knew that and obviously repeatedly wanted to share that message throughout the movie. Rape was just another means of the Serbs wanting to control Bosnia. Raping these women was the Serbians way of showing power over them, showing power over the Muslims. Raping these women was a symbolism of raping Bosnia of half of their power and sustanenance of their society. It doesn't matter that maybe the exact characters Angelina used were fictional, her point was that this is what really happened. She didn't make this just a scene in another movie. These are the stories of women from Bosnia who have survived the war. These rapes were real and as horrifying as it is for you to watch them, these women have to live with what happened for the rest of their lives. That thought, moreso than the actual rape scene, is what scared me the most.