A promising, but ultimately flawed, small-scale war drama

Rating: Null/10 (14 November 2002)

No Man's Land starts out as a very promising war movie as three wounded soldiers, two Bosniaks and one Serb, find themselves stuck in an abandoned trench between their respective armies in 1994. The Bosniaks cannot leave because one of them, Cera, has had his body booby-trapped while unconscious; the Serb, Nino, cannot leave because the second Bosniak, Ciki, is holding him as protection against Serb artillery. Unable to come up with a solution, the commanding officers on both sides call on UNPROFOR to resolve the situation. It is at this point that the film starts to display its flaws, and a number of these must be laid at the door of Danis Tanovic, both director and author of the screenplay. Tanovic appears to harbour an - admittedly understandable - bitterness towards the international community, particularly the United Nations, for its role in the conflict, but in getting his message across, he takes a series of liberties with realism. Tanovic portrays the UNPROFOR personnel - with the exception of the French Sgt. Marchand - as too petty, incompetent, cowardly and callously apathetic to get risk getting involved, and while there may have been some truth to this, Tanovic lays it on so thick it becomes gratuitous. Symptomatic of this is a moment where Marchand's superior, Cpt. Dubois, berates the journalist Jane Livingstone for listening in on his company's radio frequency; those familiar with UN peacekeeping mandates know that the troops are explicitly required to broadcast "in the clear" so that anyone can listen in. In another scene, a British colonel flies in from Zagreb, bringing his overly blonde and leggy "secretary" with him - considering the colonel's supposed obsession with his media image, this is too much for the viewer's willing suspension of disbelief to take. In conclusion, what might have been an excellent war drama, with tension being periodically relieved by wry humour, is ultimately marred by Tanovic's rather heavy-handed axe-grinding.