A noble cause for a flawed movie

Rating: 6/10 (9 January 2002)

One can never overstate the absurdity of war, especially of a fratricidal ethnic conflict as the one that ravaged Bosnia. This is the merit of `No Man's Land', a movie about a group of Bosnians and Serbs stuck in a no man's land trench under the fire of both armies, a parable of the deadly stalemate that marked this war. But this underlying noble intention is in a way better than the movie itself, if we are to distinguish end and means. There are two main flaws in Danis Tanovic's film. The first is the fact that the movie's main conflict, between the Bosnian Chiki and the Serb Nino, is not entirely convincing (it is even childish sometimes) and therefore is not up to the hatred and grievances that oppose the two nations. That's why the tragic way this conflict finally unfolds seems a bit out of proportion with the story, as if artificially conceived in order to neutralize some satirical and farcical aspects of the movie that are at odds with the gravity of the war itself. The second flaw is, ironically, the movie's only attempt at analyzing the war. As a rule, there is no effort to explain the causes of the conflict (good, it's a movie, not a dissertation), but Tanovic's screenplay attributes to the United Nations peacekeeping mission a good deal of responsibility for the absurd continuation of the war, which is nonsense. The UN bureaucracy, as well as the international press, is portrayed as the movie's villain, as if the war had more to do with personal and institutional incompetence than with historical and complex disputes between nations (6/10).