I remember finding myself in possession of a Eurailpass one
summer about 20 years ago, determined to get my money's worth
by zipping through Europe at a pace which would put even the "If-
It's-Tuesday-This Must-Be-Belgium" crowd in awe. Just for the
fun of it I took a train up and down the length of
Yugoslavia chatting with the locals in sign and sharing their yeasty
bread. Aside from noting at one point a difference in the
language on the signs, the letters changing from Latin to Cyrillic,
the people looked about the same, talked what appeared to me
the same tongue, and appeared friendly enough to one another.
After Marshal Tito's death, the apparently artificial union of the
Yugoslav people fell apart and suddenly its citziens looked at one
another not as members of a national group but as people with
ethnic hatreds--with hostilities that had long, long histories so far
back that Americans, living in a country independent now for just
225 years, would think dated back to the Jurassic Age. In the
early nineties, the Bosnian Serbs began a pogrom, which they
justified on the grounds that a similar procedure of persecution
was directed against them, oh I don't know, in 1399? 1458?
Whatever. The mass killing of Bosnian Muslims by the Serbs
seemed to them perfectly justified and by 1993 full-scale war was
in progress between the two groups. UN forces moved in to try to
separate the two sides and enforce a peace.
But cease-fires and even peace treaties are only scraps of paper
as we know from the Middle East situation today. While Bosnia
appears relatively at peace today, such as not the case in 1993,
the period covered by Danis Tanovic's noir comedy, an antiwar
picture (has any recent movie been pro-war?) and one which
makes its point with some solid M*A*S*H*-like dry humor rather
than with the ineffectively impotent raillery as in last year's flop
about the conflict in Northern Ireland, "An Everlasting Piece" and
with only those explosions and that gunplay necessary to
communicate to the audience the absurdity of the whole mess.
If wars are absurd in general, the Bosnian conflict must be one
of the most ridiculous, because the groups who hate each other
may have historical reasons for their enmity but given their
common language and enjoyment of a country so beautiful that
has for decades a mecca for tourism by jet-setters and sun-
worshippers alike, they simply had no territorial or ideological
rationale for conflict. In the principal situation set up by director
Tanovic, a Bosnian Serb and a Bosnian Muslim (misidentified by
a review I'm looking at now as "a Bosnian and a Serb" as though
they came from two, separate independent states), Ciki (Brnko
Djuric) is a Muslim and Nino (Rene Bitorajac) is a Serb who both
become trapped with each other, stalemated by a balance of
power, in a situation that could generate a play by Jean-Paul
Sartre. Most of the black comedy of the film comes from the
interaction of these two, and you can imagine the mine field (so to
speak) of possibilities if you'll only imagine yourself trapped in a
room for what could be days, maybe weeks, with a person you
don't trust, with whom you try to communicate--even discover that
you share a common friend--and yet dread the idea of falling
asleep in his presence!
The story takes root when a small contingent of Muslims get
separated from their unit in a thick fog. When all but two of them
are gunned down and killed at the crack of dawn by a Serb unit,
one Muslim, Ciki, hides in a cave while two Serbs, Nino and a
fellow soldier, investigate the trench. They discover a Muslim,
Cera (Filip Sovagovic), apparently dead and use him to arrange a
booby trap. They lay his body across a small mine in such a way
that if any moves him (or indeed if the "dead" Cera himself were to
move), everyone within thirty meters would be killed.
After spending considerable time developing his principal
characters as though they were part of an intimate, 3-person play,
writer-director Tanovic broadens the palette to bring in a
contingent of UN forces, notably a French Sergeant Marchant
(Georges Siatidis) who is frustrated by the UN's policy of neutrality
and enforced inaction; a British mid-level officer Soft (Simon
Callow); an ambitious CNN-style journalist, Jane Livingstone
(Katrin Cartlidge) and her cameraman (Primoz Ranik).
Eliciting an animated portrait of Keystone Kops, "No Man's
Land" is a panorama of know-nothings and idiots, bumblers and
stooges, higher-ups who appear to be putting in their time
awaiting their pensions, and just two competent people who seem
to care about the situation, the French sergeant and a German
expert in mine-defusion. The ambitious journalist is looking out for
her career, the English officer would rather be back at HQ playing
chess with his leggy blonde assistant, and the Bosnian soldiers,
well, they all seem like such cretins it's difficult to figure out just
what they would rather do than sit in a trench.
This is a fresh movie loaded with twists and shifts in the balance
of power between the Serb and the Muslim. Filmed largely in
Slovenia, which is to the northwest of Bosnia, "No Man's Land,"
which won the best screenplay award at Cannes, drew an
audience of 4,000 to an open-air presentation of the film at the
recent Sarajevo Film Festival. It deserves to be widely seen
elsewhere as well.
Copyright © 2001 Harvey Karten
