No Man's Land
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Branko Djuric, Filip Sovagovic, Georges Siatidis, Rene Bitorajac, Serge-Henri ValckeBrand: Sony
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); Croatian (Original Language)
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 98 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2002-04-09
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
Movie Reviews of No Man's Land
Movie Review: Brilliant, humorous, and bleak
Summary: 5 Stars
The problems plaguing the Balkans go on and on without end. Historians, political scientists, sociologists, and a plethora of other academics have isolated a number of these difficulties. There is, for example, the Ottoman domination of the region for roughly 500 years. This occupation cut off the area from the rest of Europe and its attendant social, political, and economic currents. Too, the Turks elevated tensions between ethnic groups in an effort to hold on to power once the Ottoman Empire began disintegrating, tensions that continue to fester today. Finally, don't discount the absolutely atrocious attitudes Western Europe held about the area throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Great Powers drew up borders with little regard for the peoples in question, virtually ensuring that Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Macedonians, Albanians, Greeks, and all the rest would continue to fight amongst themselves in an effort to restore their traditional lands. To sit back and wonder why those darn people in the Balkans can't seem to get their act together is to admit an ignorance of history. At the same time, figuring it all out doesn't seem to help either. Understanding what ethnic groups were fighting in the former Yugoslavia, and why they were fighting, was about as easy as deciphering the situation in Beirut in the 1980s.
Enter director Danis Tanovic's "No Man's Land," a film that captures perfectly the mind-boggling conundrums of the Balkan battlefield during the years after the Cold War. The film also transcends the peculiarities of the region to make a statement about the absurdities of war in the age of mass media. It all starts in the early 1990's in Bosnia, where Serbs and Croats are battling it out for control of the region. A small squad (platoon?) of Bosnian soldiers runs smack dab into a Serbian emplacement and pays a heavy price for the mistake. Two of the soldiers, Ciki (Branko Djuric) and Cera (Filip Sovagovic) manage to find refuge in an abandoned trench that just happens to run between Serb and Bosnian lines. While trying to figure out what to do with the seriously wounded Cera, Ciki hears a couple of Serbs coming down the trench. He hides in a bunker, helpless without a weapon, as the Serbs booby trap the prostrate Cera with an especially dangerous landmine. When an opportunity to pick up a gun presents itself, Ciki kills one of the soldiers and holds the other, Nino (Rene Bitorajac), hostage. The two bicker back and forth about who started the war, an interesting argument that radically changes in its answer whenever one of the soldiers gains an advantage over the other.
In the meantime, Cera suddenly wakes up and attempts to move. Both Nino and Ciki, realizing they will die too if the landmine goes off, try to keep the wounded man stable. How to resolve such a dilemma? Why, call in the good old United Nations and its blue helmeted peacekeeping forces, of course! Yeah, right. The UN is about as helpless in this conflict as a rat caught in a trap. Even when a series of incidents eventually alert the peacekeepers to the unfolding events in the trench, the smarmy UN General Soft (played by an oily Simon Callow) oscillates between helping the trapped soldiers and writing them off as a lost cause. A pushy reporter at the scene, Jane Livingstone (Katrin Cartlidge) doesn't help matters much. She constantly badgers the French peacekeepers to allow her access to the trench so she can broadcast the whole thing live for stellar ratings. The peacekeepers don't know what to do; they only gained access to the trench by negotiating a temporary ceasefire that could end at any second, and they are hard pressed to keep Ciki and Nino from killing each other. Poor Cera, caught up in all this brouhaha. A German mine expert brought in to defuse the device can do little to help.
The conclusion to the film is grim, but Tanovic infuses many parts of his film with great humor. The image of first Nino and then Ciki dancing around in "No Man's Land" in only their underwear, trying desperately to send a signal to their countrymen not to shoot, is hilarious. So are their arguments about the war and who the aggressors are. These disagreements essentially degenerate into a pouty, childlike exchange along the lines of "You did." "No, you did." It's nicely done how Tanovic uses such dialogue to show us the banality of war. He also uses the two men as a symbol of the larger ethnic squabbles. For instance, notice how the two achieve an uneasy peace after learning that they spent time in the same town and have a common acquaintance. This is very much in keeping with the Balkan conflicts, where many of the combatants lived and worked together in the same town for years before picking up rifles to kill each other. The role of the media in the incident comes in for especially severe criticism from Tanovic. Through the Jane Livingstone character we see how the hysterical push for a story at all costs shapes how the United Nations responds to the tragedy. The threat of bad press is the only thing that pushes Soft to take action. "No Man's Land" takes a unequivocally negative view of everyone involved in the conflict.
Don't expect to see many extras on this disc. MGM is notorious for being rather spotty in the supplements department. I remember seeing a trailer for the film, and nothing more. Oh well, the film is good enough that you don't need much to understand what it is trying to say. I applaud Danis Tanovic for making such a pitch black, piercing statement about the Balkan conflicts. This one places him right up there with Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove," a position that few attain.
Summary of No Man's Land
Between war and peace, humor and hate, capture and surrender, life and death lies No Man's Land. Set in the unforgiving trenches of the Bosnian-Serb conflict, this "astonishing" (Chicago Tribune) film follows the story of three soldiers caught between two fighting lines. Hailed as "one of the best films of 2001,"* No Man's Land is a "powerful, harrowing, shockingly entertaining" (Movieline) exploration of the absurdity of war. Fleeing enemy fire, an injuredBosnian soldier named ?iki retreats to a trench, where he finds himself trapped with a woundedcomrade and worse a Serbian! With no way to escape and with his fellow soldier lying on a spring-loaded bomb set to explode if he moves, ?iki realizes he must do the unthinkabletrust his enemyIf he wants to survive. *Associated Press, Chicago Tribune, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Hollywood Reporter, New York Daily News, New York Post.Danis Tanovic's Academy AwardŽ-winning satire of the war in the Balkans is an astounding balancing act, an acidic black comedy grounded in the brutality and horror of war. Stuck in an abandoned trench between enemy lines, a Serb and a Bosnian play the blame game in a comic tit-for-tat struggle while a wounded Bosnian soldier lies helplessly on a land mine. A French tank unit of the U.N.'s humanitarian force (known locally as "the Smurfs"), a scheming British TV reporter, a German mine defuser, and the U.N. high command (led by a bombastically ineffectual Simon Callow) all become tangled in the chaotic rescue as the tenuous cease-fire is only a spark away from detonation. Tanovic directs with a ferocious, angry eloquence and makes his points with vivid metaphors and a savage humor as harrowing as it is hilarious. Searing and smart, this satire carries an emotional recoil. --Sean Axmaker
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