Serb-Bosnia war shatters a romance, a country and the lovers' souls

Rating: 8/10 (29 November 2014)

Perhaps if this film had not been written and directed by the beautiful Angelina Jolie it would be recognized as one of the great war films. Its distinctive focus is the victimization of women in war. An end title tells us 50,000 women were raped in the Bosnian war. In the title's variation on the Promised Land, the phrase 'milk and honey' is supplanted by 'blood and honey.' That is, murder replaces sustenance, rape love, betrayal trust, and humanity is supplanted by the murderous machinery of war.
One soldier tells Danijel that his pregnant wife must be delivering a son because a little daughter would drive him mad with doting. In the context his madness would have a different source: her doom to become another victim of a soldier's rape.
The larger theme is the pervasiveness of division. The first shot is an aerial view of the landscape, A slash of river divides the Serbs and Bosnians. The people get along well enough to enjoy a dance together, where the Bosnian Moslem Ajla charmingly connects with the Serb soldier Danijel. Their promising romance is interrupted when a bomb shatters the club.
When they next meet Ajla is a prisoner and Danijel the camp commander. That power gap inhibits both their attraction, until her humiliation drives them together. The tender eroticism of their first lovemaking derives from the refuge each finds in the other, she from the other Serb soldiers' brutality and he from the callousness of his job, personified by his father the general. Even Danijel's protection fails when he is transferred to Sarajevo.
They are reunited when she, having escaped the first camp, falls in with the Bosnian underground and agrees to let herself be captured to enable her comrades to get at Danijel, now more murderous than his father. Their lovemaking turns wild from Danijel's doubting her.
The division of that promising romantic couple gives way to the division within each character. Danijel is torn between his love for her and his father's hatred of the Bosnians, for what they have done to the Serbs. Ajla overcomes her emotions for Danijel to avenge the Serbs' murder of her infant nephew. So neither a passionate love nor a driven character's mission can survive the division by war.
In her first scene Ajla is painting a self-portrait, in relatively naturalistic style. At the end we see her final self-portrait, a more expressionistic one in which she seems to have imposed her own splotchy image on the portrait Danijel's father ordered her to make of him, before he ordered her rape by another brute soldier. In this painting Ajla tries to expunge the general and her lover. Her ultimate portrait is what Danijel makes when his bullet to her head leaves an abstract red brushstroke against the canvas of the white wall. Bereft of all his resolve and mission he surrenders to the UN peacekeepers as a war criminal. In another form of self-portraiture Each character discovers him/herself from the tests of the war.
In their night visit to the art gallery Ajla teaches Danijel that in art the most important part is the empty spaces, where the artist decides to do nothing. The war is the something the parties should not be doing. The war discovers the vacancy in both warring parties and the war's emptying of all the people's hearts, whether the respective ethnic communities or the central lovers, both together and alone.
The film should not be judged as a documentary record of this war. As a fiction its thematic sweep covers a larger issue: every war's undermining of nature, humanity, and the positive sustenance of our feminine nature.