Powerfully Direct

Rating: 9/10 (30 April 2002)

A clever black comedy, Denis Tanovic's film about enemies trapped in a trench during the conflict in Bosnia has a lot on its mind, primarily its intention to showcase the global political impotence towards the conflict and the insidious influence of a corrupt media--it covers a lot of bases. Tanovic doesn't have a lot of use for his characters other than as caricatures and mouthpieces (though there are some nice performances by Branko Djuric and Rene Bitorajac as two of the adversaries and Georges Siatidis as a concerned French U.N. observer) but he does infuse his script with plenty of humanity and the point of the project is to express his outrage at needless, sadistic carnage. Though the film is always predictable in its irony (especially the hardly-surprising ending) it never ceases to carry a wallop and Tanovic's blunt, angry agenda has a powerful directness that comes as a result of a persevering personal vision. Well-made.