Rating- * * * * (4/5)
I don’t get many opportunities to see foreign films, being that I live in Birmingham (if you haven’t been here, it’s not exactly a high-society town). When I do, it is usually because the film received a lot of attention from the mainstream media or from the Academy. In the case of this film, it came under my attention when it received the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. It is very fortunate that the Academy gives attention to movies like this, which I otherwise would not have seen. The film plays kind of like a stage play, since it involves very few characters and almost all the action takes place in the same small area. It takes place on the frontlines of the Balkan War when a Bosnian finds himself in an abandoned trench with one dead friend. The trench is not in either army’s territory, meaning that it is in, you guessed it, no man’s land. The action begins when two Serbians investigate the trench and place the dead soldier’s body on a bouncing land mine (this is a mine that bounces up and explodes when a weight is removed from it). The Bosnian jumps out and kills one of the Serbians and holds the other hostage. The rest of the film involves dialogue between the two soldiers about their situation and the war in general. Their situation is complicated when the “dead” soldier wakes up and realizes that he can’t move or he risks blowing himself and everyone else to hell. The film is very broad in its scope, using the two main characters as pretty obvious representations of their respective nations, but it also remains very personal, thus making it all the more effective at driving home its point. The point, by the way is that the war in the Balkans is bad enough, but once the UN and the Western media get involved, the problems only worsen. Visually, the environments of No Man’s Land are very plain and bleak, much like life would become after being trapped in a trench for days upon end. The film has its lighthearted moments, particularly in the dialogue between the two soldiers as they make a futile attempt to try and determine which side really started the war. This is a rare film that speaks on a well-known conflict from the insider’s perspective, which is frankly one that we don’t see much in the Balkans. This film comes from someone who is tired, beaten by the war. He doesn’t care who started it anymore, he just wants it to end. He has hope and resolve and manages to keep up a sense of humor about the whole thing, but in the end he realizes that the entire conflict is utterly absurd and, unfortunately, may never end. This is one of the most well-made films of the year and arguably the best foreign language film of the year. I highly recommend it for film-buffs, humanists and would-be politicians.