Let’s face it, this film didn’t stand a chance .
Maybe it’s professional jealousy or personal animosity or a combination of both but Angelina Jolie continues to be a polarizing figure in the entertainment community.
It is not surprising, then, that some folks had the knives out when it was revealed Ms. Jolie was not only going to write and direct her first dramatic feature but serve as one of the producers. (Oh, the hubris of it all!)
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Filmmaker
Since star-driven vehicles often skid out of control (a San Francisco weekly actually prefaced a negative review by film critic Karina Longworth with the headline: “An Anti-Movie Star Makes a Vanity Project”) I popped the film into my DVD player expecting the worst.
What I saw instead was a raw, vivid and emotionally wrenching drama directed with vigor and intelligence by a filmmaker who obviously cares passionately about the subject matter.
And, just to make matters clear, I am not an unabashed fan of Ms. Jolie’s recent body of work. True, her Oscar-winning turn in Girl, Interrupted was a force of nature and, in my opinion, she shoulda won a second Oscar for her role as real-life heroine Marianne Pearl in 2007′s A Mighty Heart. I also enjoyed her larger-than-life persona in popcorn pics like Salt and Wanted. However, I thought Life or Something Like It and Alexander were unmitigated disasters and The Tourist was every bit as awful as you may have heard.
Portrait of the Artist as an Action Heroine: Angelina Jolie in “Salt”
The setting for Blood and Honey is the Balkans in the early 1990s. Ajla (Zana Marjanovich), a spirited Bosnian Muslim painter and Danijel (Goran Kopstic), a dashing Serbian cop meet in pre-war Sarajevo. In the opening scenes we get a glimpse of the strong attraction between the characters. Then the war intervenes and their relationship changes irrevocably.
Zana Marjanovic & Goran Kostic: In the Land of Blood and Hatred
- Ajla is captured by Serbian soldiers and winds up in the prison camp in which Danijel is serving as an officer in the Serbian army. He tries to help her but all bets are off when he is transferred to another camp.
The film has been dismissed by some critics as little more than, to quote Canadian movie reviewer Jay Stone, “Romeo and Juliet in an internment camp” but for this viewer the characters of Ajla and Danijel help put the conflict into human terms.
Actually, the critics may have been among the few to view the film on the big screen. The Stateside release was limited to 18 theatres with a combined box office take – according to boxofficemojo.com – of $303, 877. (The budget is rumored to be around $10 million.)
Perhaps at this point, though, Ms. Jolie may care more about making a point than making a potful of money.
I mean, if she really wanted to make a commercial flick she could have cast herself and longtime paramour Brad Pitt as the star-crossed lovers.
Instead, she hired two unknown (to American audiences) Balkan actors to play the key roles of Ajla and Danijel (and shot two versions of the film … including one in Serbo-Croatian with English subtitles.)
Ms. Jolie says she got the idea for the story while touring through the Balkans as a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations. ” I was thinking a lot about my ten years traveling into these situations and all the people I met who had gone through conflict and how their lives were affected,” she told USA Today‘s Susan Wloszczyna. “I chose Bosnia because I had been through the area and was very drawn to the region.”
Although the film fared poorly at the American box office it was a hit at a (relatively new) film festival in Sarajevo where Ms. Jolie received an award … and a standing ovation. Judging from a report filed by BBC News correspondent Alan Little that was the audience that really counted.
Angelina Jolie Accepts Honorary Award at Sarajevo Film Festival
“It was one of the most amazing nights of my life, to be a part of that,” she told Little. “You take people’s stories, their histories and you try to do your best by them but you’re not making a documentary; it’s an artistic interpretation, a film … and you see these people sitting here, reliving the worst parts of their lives and you think, Are they going to embrace it, or are they going to get upset? And when they stood I thought I was going to cry.”
“The dialogue was so authentic,” Ms. Marjanovic told USA Today. “When I spoke to Angelina on the phone, the first thing I asked was whether she did it. I said, ‘No matter what happens after this, I want to say congratulations and thank you as a Bosnian for the script.’ “
The fledgling filmmaker also earned praise from veteran actor/filmmaker Clint Eastwood, who directed Ms. Jolie in The Changeling: “I think it’s a tough movie and that it’s extremely well made, and tough movies that are extremely well made are very hard to do.”
“In the Land of Blood and Honey is not an easy film to watch,” warns Little. “It depicts, in bleak and chilling detail, the brutal process by which hundreds of thousands of non-Serbs were removed from their homes in the campaign that came to be known as ethnic cleansing. Civilians are casually gunned down in the street; women are repeatedly raped.”
(Yes, the film contains nudity and shocking violence. However, in the opinion of this viewer the scenes of brutality have been added to hammer home a point and the nudity is never gratuitous, an offshoot, perhaps, of having a woman behind the camera.)
“Go to the Serbian half of the country and you enter a parallel universe,” reports Little. “Here, atrocities committed in the name of the Serb nation, aimed at carving out an ethnically pure Serb territory in Bosnia, are routinely denied.”
Dragan Mutapdzija is a Serb veteran of the 1992-95 conflict and an inmate in a war-time prison camp for several months.
“Serbs never deny that crimes were committed,” he told Little. “But they were committed by individuals and not by the whole nation. This film demonizes our nation. Yet again the Serbs are depicted as the bad guys.”
So does the film lack balance? “The war was not balanced,” Little quotes Jolie as saying. “I can’t understand people who are looking for a balance that did not exist. There are some people who don’t want to be reminded of these things, some even who deny that these things even happened. Those people are going to be angry.”
Kostic agrees. “It is very difficult, I suppose, to be unbiased and not to offend anybody so whatever you write, someone is going to be unhappy,” he is quoted as saying on lasplash.com. “For me it was important to get the female point of view. I can’t judge if someone else would have done it better or differently. She is the one who decided to do it and she did a great job.”
Rade Šerbedžija plays Serbian commander Nebojša Vukojević
Rade Šerbedžija represents the Serbian side of the equation. As depicted in the film his character is a remorseless killer seeking revenge for the murder of members of his family by Bosnian forces.
Ms. Jolie says one of the aims of the film was to create an awareness of the war.
“The choice to make a film about this area and set in this time in history was also to remind people of what happened not so long ago …” she is quoted as saying on IBTIMES.com
If that is true, she has already achieved that aim with this viewer. Because, after this film I wanted to know more about the war that the West has forgotten (and never knew that much about in the first place.)
As in most wars, there are two sides to the story. For a viewpoint not included in the film click on the link below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lMobCjvh10
