No Man's Land (98 mins, 15) Directed by Danis Tanovic; starring Branko Djuric, Rene Bitorajac, Georges Siatidis, Katrin Cartlidge, Simon Callow
- No Man's Land
- Production year: 2001
- Countries: Ireland, Rest of the world
- Cert (UK): 15
- Runtime: 98 mins
- Directors: Danis Tanovic, David Rane, Neasa Ni Chianain
- Cast: Branko Djuric, Katrin Cartlidge, Rene Bitorajac
- More on this film
The civil war in the former Yugoslavia has thrown up a varied body of films over the past 10 years. Emir Kusturica's Underground, a hectic three-hour-long magic realist piece, covered 50 years of history from the Nazi invasion to the nation's break-up. In Srdjan Dragojevic's Pretty Village, Pretty Flame, a Muslim and a Serb, friends since childhood, found themselves on different sides in Bosnia. Michael Winterbottom's Welcome to Sarajevo viewed the siege through the eyes of foreign journalists. In his farce Beautiful People, Jasmin Dizdar brought the war to London through the violent confrontation between two embattled refugees.
What none of these films does is throw new, revealing light upon the complex historical and ethnic background to the conflict and they all refrain from the direct presentation of atrocities and war crimes. The same is true of Danis Tanovic's assured directorial debut, No Man's Land, winner of the latest Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Like most earlier pictures in this area it turns on two men finding themselves by chance on opposite sides.
A thriller laced with black humour, the movie is set in 1993. A guide leading a detachment of Bosnian replacements up to the front line one foggy night loses his way. When dawn comes they're trapped in the open and savagely mown down by the Serbs. Only the seasoned private soldier Ciki survives, falling with an apparently dead comrade into an abandoned trench in no man's land. Two Serbs, one of them a brutalised veteran, the other - Nino - a callow recruit, are dispatched to inspect the trench. The malicious older man, to Nino's disgust, plants a booby trap under a Bosnian corpse, before being killed by the concealed Ciki. Nino is taken prisoner and the pair snarl at each other like trapped animals. Then suddenly the corpse, a comrade of Ciki's, revives, but must be kept in place to stop the bouncing bomb killing him and anyone around him. It's a brilliantly contrived situation combining two familiar plots - the dangerous bomb that can only be defused by an expert (eg, Powell and Pressburger's The Small Back Room, Anthony Minghella's The English Patient), and the enemies thrust together and dependent on each other for survival.
Ciki and Nino engage in a power struggle, largely determined by who happens to have the gun. But despite odd moments in which they recognise a common bond, Nino's humanity is steadily eroded until he is more vicious than the older man. Then help seems at hand, as a temporary truce is called so that a United Nations armoured car can approach the trench and assess the situation. A French sergeant, who volunteered for the assignment in Bosnia, has his idealism tested at every dangerous roadblock, and does his best to get his superiors to act. When an intrepid British TV journalist, the satirically named Jane Livingstone (Katrin Cartlidge), gets on to the story, a senior British officer, Colonel Soft (Simon Callow) is forced to become involved. As most of the French officers are away at a conference on media relations in Switzerland, a German bomb disposal expert has to be called in.
No Man's Land is at times rather broad in its effects, but it moves briskly, logically, and in its final section achieves a forceful combination of horror and dark humour. Sentimentality and an easy cynicism are avoided, and at the end when Colonel Soft thanks his subordinates ('Good work, gentlemen') and invites the press to a conference later that evening ('the Holiday Inn at 2200') one doesn't know whether to laugh or cry. The movie is about the absurdity of a particular war, but it ends up reflecting the absurd nature of life itself.
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