Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams (2005)* *

Grbavica (link to DVD at Amazon)

****warning: this review is going to reveal the main plot twist****

I have yet to see a movie concerning the Bosnian War that is not flat out depressing. This one is no exception. The film starts with a meeting of a women's support group for women traumatized by the war. Mainly the women just sit there silently -- they get paid to come whether or not they speak. But their faces are frozen pictures of depression and brokenness. The camera zooms in on one middle aged woman -- like the others, her face is numb and her eyes dull.

Over the next hour, we see her difficult life as the single parent of a rebellious teenager. As we watch the ho-hum drama of daily life, the scars of the war are everywhere. The mother, Esma, takes on a job as a waitress to make extra money for a field trip for her daughter, Sara. There she meets a man who recognizes her. Turns out they had both been visiting the morgue to look at the exhumed bodies in search of their fathers. He is now a body-guard but had been a medical student before the war changed everything. At school, the kids whose fathers were killed in the war get a discount on the field trip. On and on, the signs of the war are everywhere.

Esma has always told Sara that her father was killed in the war. Sara is beginning to question this story. Sara and Esma argue incessantly about this and that. In one particularly ugly argument, Sara challenges her mother about her father. In her anger, Esma tells Sara the truth. She is the unwanted bastard child of the camps. The result of the nightly rapes that her mother suffered while at the camp. Once Esma tells the truth, the dam has been breached and the rest spills forth. How she would beat her belly to try to kill the baby...how she wanted to abandon Sara at the hospital, but her milk came in and to relieve it she nursed Sara and then could not abandon her.

Ug. To the movie's credit, it does not end predictably with the daughter blowing her brains out. What has happened has happened and life simply goes on. The truth is cathartic in the end for both, and the film ends on the happiest note possible, I suppose. Meaning life goes on. Happiness is perhaps no longer in the cards for the characters, but the weight of the terrible past is lifted slightly.

I gave the movie 2 stars since it was really painful to watch and Kaja would have berated me if I gave it more stars (he hated the movie). The acting however is good. Watched on Netflix Instant Viewing.

Svjedoci (Witnesses, 2004)* * *

Set in a Croatian village during the Balkans war. Three soldiers come in the dead of night, open the door to a house and mow down a civilian with their machine guns. They retreat to a nearby home with a recent war widow -- her husband is laying in the coffin in the living room. The men are nervous, all conversations are conducted in whispers. The woman hovers like a witch. What is her relationship to the young soldiers? Did she order the killing? Or are have they taken her hostage? Thus begins Svejdoci (Witnesses) a murder mystery set in a small Croatian village during the the Balkan war.

The mystery is unraveled by retelling the same critical hours from the perspective of different characters at the center of the mystery. Color is slowly added to the picture and we begin to understand each character better. It is an interesting technique. One by one, each character become 3-dimensional and eventually when the last story is told, the pieces of the mystery fall together

I thought the movie was interesting and I like the unusual cinematography and the greenish light in most of the shots. I was sucked in by the stories and enjoyed trying to solve the mystery. Kaja found the movie a bore.

Watched via "Instant viewing" on Netflix. Svejdoci on Netflix. The nice thing about instant viewing on Netflix is that you can try out movies. So if you are curious you can watch the first 15 minutes of Svejdoci and see if you are like me, and get intrigued, or like Kaja, and get bored.

No Man's Land * * *

No Man's Land was the 2001 Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, and it won a long, long list of awards in Europe also. It's the story of three soldiers that end up trapped in a trench between enemy (in this case, Serbian and Bosnian) lines during the Serb-Bosnian war. Two soldiers are Bosnia and one is Serbian. The story is a bit like a play carried out in a trench. The two main characters are one of the Bosnians and the Serb (the other Bosnian is trapped on top of a mine). The plot follows the 'relationship' of the two soldiers as it evolves over the course of a day, from enemies, to begrudging cooperators, and then to hatred.

Most reviews I've read have focused on the film's message of the insanity and senselessness of war. However, to me, it was more about the perverseness and sheer arbitrary nature of hatred by individual soliders. Mere chance of parentage determines that one would end up on one side versus the other. Under other circumstances these two soldiers would have gotten along perfectly fine. It reminds me of the story about the German and English (I think) soldiers in WWI who were shooting at each other from two trench lines and somehow decided to take a break and have a soccer game together.

Compared to the other war film I saw recently, Downfall, I think No Man's Land is certainly a good film, but it didn't feel like a 'landmark film' like Downfall. Somehow, it didn't have the same 'Oh, wow' factor, for me. Also one of the differences to Downfall, is that this did feel like a film rather than like I was a 'fly on the wall' in the trench. The acting is excellent, and I can't put my finger on why I felt that way, but nonetheless, that is a difference from how I felt watching Downfall.

Rent it from Netflix