War is still making headlines, of course, and with Richard Shepard's quite excellent
The Hunting Party looming on the horizon (more on this soon), I thought I'd re-post this review of 2001's
No Man's Land. To wit:
Writer-director Danis Tanovic’s film opens with a group of Bosnian soldiers, ostensibly on a relief mission, lost in a thick, soupy battlefield fog. It’s an apt visual metaphor for
No Man’s Land, a well-acted, thoughtfully constructed tragicomic exploration of just how murky all-consuming hate can be, even among starkly pronounced enemies.
Set in 1993 during the height of the Bosnian civil war,
No Man’s Land takes its title from where its lead characters find themselves trapped. When the aforementioned fog dissipates and the Serbs open fire, reneging on a tentative peace accord, a T-shirt-clad fighter named Ciki (Branko Djuric) survives and manages to make his way to an abandoned ditch in between the two entrenched fronts. When the Serbian commander sends two of his soldiers to check the trench, Ciki hides and they find nothing. Before they leave, the duo set a booby trap, laying one of the dead Bosnian soldiers on a spring mine so that when his comrades find his body and move it, they too will be killed. As they finish the job, they notice that an abandoned rifle there minutes before is now missing; someone is in the trench with them. Cornered, Ciki springs from his hiding place, killing one of the Serb soldiers and wounding the other, a shiny-pated rookie named Nino (Rene Bitorajac). Rather than finish Nino off, however, Ciki spares him, figuring he may be a useful bargaining tool.
Then, to their joint astonishment, Cera (Filip Sovagovic), the Bosnian soldier placed on the mine, comes to. He wasn’t dead after all, but rather wounded and rendered unconscious by the initial attack, and if Cera moves the mine under him will explode, killing them all. Stuck between their comrades on either side but unable to communicate with them or explain their situation, Ciki and Nino have no choice but to settle in and wait for darkness, when it will be safer to make some sort of move.
The power dynamic shifts several times as weapons change hands, but tension stands waiting in the wings, an ever-present figure in Tanovic’s tightly assembled drama.
Also figuring prominently into the proceedings are Jane Livingstone (Katrin Cartlidge), a scoop-seeking cable TV journalist who stirs things up, and a well-meaning Frenchman, Sergeant Marchand (George Siatidis, an even more wolfish European iteration of
Adrien Brody), frustrated by the stultifying inaction of his United Nations superiors, who include the rather obviously named Colonel Soft (
Four Weddings and a Funeral’s Simon Callow).
Much more than just an absurdist predicament,
No Man’s Land manages to pull moments both light (
the soldiers call the UN peacekeepers “smurfs” because of their light blue helmets) and grim — as well as always human — from its set-up. Ciki and Nino’s arguments are at first very straightforward and didactic, but
as the film moves away from speechifying and into more illustrative examples of their (assumed) differences, it really gathers steam.
Plenty of films of this type, in which two mortal enemies are confined to specific quarters, have rosy and/or oversimplified worldviews that usually translate into cloying, pat resolutions. If everyone would just get together and
talk, really get to know the so-called enemy, these optimistic films tell us, then things would be better, everyone would see how similar we really are to our neighbor. The small but crowning victory of
No Man’s Land, Bosnia’s official entry for the foreign
language Academy Award, is that
while Ciki and Nino forge an uneasy alliance for joint benefit, they never fully trust one another, they never give in to the absurdity of their situation. Yet
No Man’s Land isn’t darkly pessimistic by any stretch (indeed, an opening exchange defines the difference between pessimists and optimists as being that the first always thinks things could be worse, while the latter
knows they can be). It’s simply
steeped in a recognizable vanity and humanity largely lacking in many pictures of its ilk — qualities that lend the film an inordinate amount of gravity.
To purchase the film on DVD via Amazon, click here.
(United Artists, R, 97 minutes) 
