You know the one about how if soldiers could just get together and talk and see how much alike they were, there'd be no war?
Well, the bleak and acerbic "No Man's Land" takes that cliche, folds it and puts it where the moon don't shine.
Branko Djuric and Rene Bitorajac star in "No Man's Land."
(United Artists/MGM)
|
|
In its dark center, two soldiers are isolated in a trench between the lines and get to know each other away from the pettiness of nations and armies. Here's what they try and do: kill the hell out of each other.
The movie, written and directed by Danis Tanovic, is as black as the soot in the chimney. Besides abjuring the sentimentalism of the bonding cliche, it makes rude noises about such hallowed institutions as the United Nations Peacekeeping Forces and the Heroic Media, all of which it regards as shameless hucksters of sanctimony.
It's not a pretty picture, but it is a funny one, if you agree with Tanovic that all human behavior tends toward folly, cowardice, self-deception, corruption and hopelessness.
The year is 1993. In the Yugoslavian civil war, a Bosnian patrol becomes lost in the fog between the lines. When the fog clears in the daylight, they're in the middle of a field. Unfortunately, 50 yards away is a Serbian machine gun position. The one survivor takes refuge in an abandoned trench in no man's land, classic World War I parlance for the zone between the lines.
The Serbs send out a two-man patrol; more shots are fired, and suddenly two men (Branko Djuric and Rene Bitorajac) are facing each other in the trench. If either leaves, the other's side will kill him. They are stuck in the middle with each other. A further complication arises when one of the bodies lying in the trench turns out to be alive but, alas, he has already been booby-trapped. If he moves, everybody dies.
French peacekeepers attempt to get the men out but their radio is overheard by television reporters.
Soon the little event has blossomed into a cynical international drama in which each participant is trying to advance his own career and doesn't give a damn about the trapped men (the movie is weirdly similar to Billy Wilder's 1951 classic "Ace in the Hole," about a reporter trying to spin a trapped spelunker into his own big-time journalism comeback).
You want a happy ending? You want sunshine, sentimentality, a sense of justice and honor and duty? Me too. But you won't find it here.
NO MAN'S LAND (R, 98 minutes) – contains violence, language, emotional intensity and practices satire without a license. At the Cineplex Odeon Dupont Circle and Shirlington.
