To die for

Bosnian soldier Sera (Filip Sovagovic) is having an extremely difficult good news/bad news day. First he survives a Serbian field artillery blast. Then a Global News crew and a United Nations peacekeeping squadron monitor his welfare as he lies in a wide stretch of trench between two battling forces. But he is certainly in no position to celebrate.

“How are you doing?” asks his comrade Ciki (Branko Djuric). “Great,” says Sera. “First they shoot at me. Then I wake up on a mine. Then the whole world is watching and I need to shit. And then you irritate me with stupid questions.” “I’m staying here with you,” says Ciki. “If you die, I die, too” “What a comfort,” says Sera. So it goes in writer-director Danis Tanovic’s No Man’s Land, a bracing, dourly satiric war-is-hell drama in which absurdity and grim reality are inseparably joined at the hip.

Serb soldier Nino (Rene Bitorajac) is also in the trench with Ciki and Sera. He and another soldier on reconnaissance assignment mistook Sera for dead and placed him on a “bounce” mine as a booby trap while Ciki watched unarmed from inside a trench bunker. If Sera is moved, the mine springs three feet into the air and detonates, turning anyone in the vicinity into instant hamburger. It’s a scenario Ciki wants to avert, so he arms himself with a discarded gun at first chance and kills Nino’s companion. He also tries to kill Nino but they enter into a wary, volatile stalemate with awakened Sera complicating their situation.

No Man’s Land, which won this year’s Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film and the Cannes Best Screenplay award, is a sort of Bosnia-Herzegovina version of Waiting for Godot. It is a rather familiar futility-of-war story boiled down to intimate, face-to-face confrontations and freshly repainted with broad strokes of deadpan bitterness and modern madness. It’s a rueful, explosive scream for sanity in a world that semantically sanitizes genocide as “ethnic cleansing,” turns war into televised sensationalism, and destroys cities, pastoral countryside and lives in the name of righteousness and revenge.

The film knocks United Nations peacekeeping efficiency (the multi-nation force needs translators to communicate even with itself) and commitment (the highest-ranking officer here is more content with a “let’s wait and see” approach to the conflict). It asks us to ponder the possibility of true neutrality when organized murder masquerades as civil war, and it infuses the film with such details as a Bosnian soldier wearing a Sticky Fingers (the Rolling Stones logo) T-Shirt, the mention of “Made in the U.S.” markings on the mine at the core of Sera’s dilemma, and such oddities as two enemy soldiers knowing the same girl.

The acting is excellent. Sovagovic maintains a credible, caustic sense of humor while on the edge of death. Djuric and Bitorajac are credible as mortal enemies reduced to parading in their boxer shorts and waving white flags to enlist help from absolutely anyone, and engaging in juvenile finger pointing (“You did!”/”No you did!”) as to whose countrymen started the war and has committed the worse atrocities.

Simon Callow plays a French UN official who really believes in his mission to expedite peace, tires of being just a bystander, disobeys orders and springs into action to “maybe save at least one life.” Katrin Cartlidge brings a touch of career lust and exasperation as the war correspondent prodded by her news center into creating news when none is apparent.

One joke in the film ends in the punchline that “a pessimist thinks things can’t get any worse. An optimist knows they can.” It’s a running joke here that poor Sera is evidently both. Not as funny is the fact that all the problems here are solved mostly based on the fact that one man has a gun and the other doesn’t. As one participant so succinctly puts it, “This whole business stinks to high heaven.”