Movie Review: In the Land of Blood and Honey

Jay Stone, Postmedia News
January 27, 2012

In the Land of Blood and Honey: Writer/director Angelina Jolie gives us a long and brutal history lesson on the Bosnian war.

Photo by: Handout

In this long and brutal history lesson about the Bosnian war, writer/director Angelina Jolie tells the story of a Muslim woman who is held in a rape camp run by her ex-lover, a Serb policeman. Jolie never comes to terms with the psychological confusions, although her earnest commitment is unquestionable.

Starring: Zana Marjanovic, Goran Kostic and Rade Serbedzija

Rating: Three stars out of five

(In Serbo-Croatian with English subtitles)

Angelina Jolie's cri de coeur about the Bosnian war, In the Land of Blood and Honey, is pretty well 127 minutes of dread and atrocity: a grim, sincere, harrowing and muddled story of the affair between a Bosnian artist and her Serbian captor. It's Romeo and Juliet in an internment camp, with the added complication that Romeo will occasionally tie Juliet to the bed as part of their bleak love story.

This is a difficult film to watch, although it is made with great passion and authenticity, told by actors from the area and in their own language. (It was a Best Foreign Film nominee at the Golden Globes.) Jolie wrote and directed it, and while she shows more skill as a director -- the plot is fitful and psychologically baffling -- there is no question of her earnestness. In the Land of Milk and Honey succeeds in at least one way: It reminds the world of the horrors that it ignored in the 1990s. The problem is getting people out to the theatres to sit through them now.

The artist is Ajla (lovely Zana Marjanovic), a Muslim woman who has a flirtation with Danijel (Goran Kostic, who resembles a Balkan Daniel Craig in certain light), a Serbian policeman. But then the war starts, with Serbs "cleansing" Muslim towns, driving families into the streets using snipers to pick them off as they dash among the ruins, hunting for food and water.

Ajla (pronounced eye-la) is taken along with a group of women to the army headquarters, where they are used as servants, cooks and sex slaves. It's a terrifying prospect, from the moment the leather-booted soldiers come clattering up the stairs of an apartment building, hauling people outside, killing some and herding the rest into buses. It's a grimly familiar scene -- and grimly familiar history -- from scores of films about Nazi roundups in 1930s Germany.

Jolie shows one rape -- a young woman is grabbed, bent over a table and assaulted with a measure of repulsive swagger -- but turns away from the others. Despite the brutality of the story, we are left to guess the worst, from the bruises on some womens' legs and the hopelessness in their eyes. But there are so many other war crimes, including the death of a baby and the use of women as human shields, that the film almost exhausts your sense of outrage.

Ajla is luckier than most: Danijel has become a captain in the army, and he is in charge of the camp. He can protect her, although it's a strangely violent kind of arrangement, in which she stands uncertain of her role -- prisoner? lover? war trophy? -- and he likewise totters between mastery and worship. Jolie may be trying to tell us something about the ambivalence of war, or the fraught landscape of sexual politics, but the point is opaque. Later, when Ajla and Danijel become lovers and he alternately berates her, makes tender love to her, or lashes her to the bedpost, In the Land of Blood and Honey takes a turn toward the creepy.

The film travels from year to year and town to town, showing killings, beatings, and the crowing of drunken soldiers. There's an occasional radio broadcast reminding us of what happened in those days -- the world is indifferent, the UN is powerless, America finally decides to care -- but the relationship that's supposed to bring this to life remains a mystery. "I don't like taking part in this war, killing people I went to school with," Danijel says, a pretty shallow idea of decency.

There is a feeling of melodrama that extends to Danijel's relationship with his father, a Serb general played with grizzled fire by the veteran actor Rade Serbedzija (Before the Rain). The general stands as a stalwart figure of tribal hatred. His monologue about how his family was killed in 1944 by an invading Turkish army gives frightening momentum to his pitiless slaughter, and Jolie is wise enough to just let him go: The fear in Ajla's eyes as he narrates his history tells you everything you need to know about what happened to Bosnia in the 1990s.