Nice Jolie

Rating: 10/10 (12 February 2012)

Films about the state of affairs in the former Yugoslavia made by the people who lived through the times before, during, and after the breakup of that country have what I have termed a savage whimsy to them. The blackest of humor permeates even the most horrific situations (Danis Tanovic's NO MAN'S LAND comes to mind), black humor that has arisen from the defiant spark of rebellion rather than resignation about the hopeless mess that life can be. Angelina Jolie's not unimpressive feature film directorial debut, IN THE LAND OF BLOOD AND HONEY, lacks that sophistication. However, it does a fine job of setting forth with a stark lack of sentiment the crimes against humanity that were perpetrated during the war that broke out in that region in the early 1990s. Jolie's is a lean direction, with a fine eye for evocative composition and a blistering sense of outrage cloaked equally well in the tension of shocked silence an in the expected wails of anguish.
The writing, also done by Jolie, is less effective. The best way to consider a script that abounds with the convenient coincidences found here is as an allegory, and the characters who people those coincidences as symbols, particularly towards the end, where the action takes place in a blindingly white room that smacks of either limbo or purgatory. On this level, it is moderately successful. The lovers at the center of the story Ajla and Danijel, sum up between them the ethnic and religious divides that the war encompassed. She's a Muslim, he's a Serb, and theymeet on the last night of peace in Sarajevo. He the handsome police officer who spies her across a crowded club dance floor, she the beauty waiting to be swept off her feet. They dance, they nuzzle, and when the bomb goes off signaling the start of hostilities, they both minister to the wounded. Several months later, she has been arrested and he is one of the officers where she is detained. She and the other women serve and service the soldiers in ways calculated to dehumanize them. Danijel offers courtesy and respect, albeit only in private, as well as a gentle courtship that is at odds with the brutal rapes to which the other women are subjected and which Jolie depicts with an intimate intensity that gives no quarter to the audience.
The conversations, between the lovers and others, by contrast, are barely concealed dialectics on moral relativity, though the actors involved, Zana Marjanovic and Goran Kostic, pour their hearts and souls into the performances as each tries to justify their feelings for each other and for what their people are doing to each other. Danijel is the well-meaning villain of the piece, standing silently as others do evil and being slowly changed by his passive acceptance of what is happening, and by his inability to cross his father, a general and symbol of knee-jerk jingoism with a hatred for Muslims that stretches back 600 years and is fueled by atrocities committed within his own lifetime.
As the years go by, the bodies of the dead pile up, the abstract becomes the personal, and the living are reduced to their religion, ethnicity, politics, or anything but their basic humanity. IN THE LAND OF BLOOD AND HONEY ultimately becomes a string of teachable moments, as a good allegory should be, and told, also as an allegory should be. with images that burrow into the psyche with a calculated artistry.