‘No Man’s Land’

A Serb and a Bosnian find themselves eye-to-eye in this dialogue-driven film.   [R]

By: Kam Williams
   Every year, along comes that critically acclaimed little import that audiences ignore until after it’s been nominated for an Academy Award. Usually, the movie is some hard-to-pigeonhole genre-bender, like last year’s Best Foreign Film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (China). Part chop-socky, part majestic fable, that instant classic floundered, at first, simply because its description sounded so implausible.
   This was also the case in 1999 with Life Is Beautiful (Italy), a Holocaust comedy that struggled at the box office during its initial run. That touching tale about a concentration-camp internee’s attempt to shield his young son from the horrors all around them was resuscitated at Oscar time. Ultimately, Life is Beautiful took home a trio of awards. Everyone had avoided an absolute treasure since it was hard to believe that such sensitive subject matter could be successfully mixed with humor.

Georges Siatidis stars as Marchand in No Man’s Land, winner for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2002 Academy Awards.

   Similarly, No Man’s Land (Bosnia), this year’s winner in the Best Foreign Film category, offers its own offbeat combination of cinematic schools. This alternately bloody and bittersweet tableau, set in 1993 during the Bosnian-Serb ethnic-cleansing conflict, is a grim morality play about greed, hate, corruption and the insanity of war. Simultaneously, it is a light-hearted farce that is not above resorting to the silliest of slapstick for a cheap laugh.
   Somehow, writer-director Danis Tanovic has crafted a remarkably absorbing tale out of the most pedestrian of predicaments. After a brief but bloody skirmish, the only survivors left standing — one Bosnian, one Serb — find themselves suddenly stranded together in a trench between front lines. A third soldier, very seriously wounded, lies motionless atop a spring-loaded landmine. If he moves, the detonation will blow them all to bits.
   This is the claustrophobic point of departure of No Man’s Land, the most dialogue-driven war movie you could ever expect to savor. This thought-provoking exercise in futility, which won the Best Screenplay Award at Cannes (2001), unfolds more like a play than a film. Its characters almost forget about their weapons, and even the war that awaits on either side, as they actually talk to each other in earnest. Communication is possible because the Serbs, Bosnians and Croats all speak the same language, even though each group calls its indistinguishable dialect Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian, respectively.
   At first, Chiki (Branko Djuric), a burly, foul-mouthed Bosnian, gets the drop on Nino (Rene Bitorajac), a nerdy Serb who doesn’t look like he belongs anywhere near the front lines. Chiki, who sports a Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers T-shirt under his uniform, immediately begins to bully the frail fellow at gunpoint.
   "Who started the war?" he demands.
   "Why must I answer?" Nino responds.
   "Because I have a gun and you don’t. Who started the war?"
   "We did," Nino capitulates.
   Then, a comedy of errors ensues. First, the tables get turned and Nino decides to exact the same confession out of captive Chiki, relying on the same rationale. Next, they wave a white flag and are fired upon by both armies. Now, they realize that a temporary truce is the only hope for either of them.
   Even when peacekeeping troops are called upon to intervene, the callous U.N. commander refuses to intervene. Only after the press catches wind of the stranded pair’s plight does the resulting media circus embarrass the U.N. forces into action. But by then, the movie has already made its anti-war message that soldiers are people, too, helplessly caught up in the grinding gears of a conflict that could care less about them.
Rated R. Contains a few graphic scenes of violence and frequent profanity.