Review: ‘No Man’s Land’ not your typical war movie

Geoff Carter

Friday, March 15, 2002 | 10:03 a.m.

No Man's Land

Grade: *** 1/2

Starring: Branko Djuric, Rene Bitorajac, Filip Sovagovic and Georges Siatidis.

Screenplay: Danis Tanovic.

Director: Danis Tanovic.

Rated: R for scenes of intense war violence and strong language.

Running time: 88 minutes.

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Several recent films have tried to explain the war in Yugoslavia, or more accurately, they've tried to adapt it. "Harrison's Flowers" and "Behind Enemy Lines" used the bloody conflict as a backdrop to uninteresting stories about Americans who were stupid enough to get caught in the crossfire. The Bosnian/Serbian conflict of those films was drawn entirely from op-ed pages -- people miles and miles from the conflict.

Danis Tanovic's "No Man's Land," an Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Film, is actually there -- or as close as any sane person should dare to get. Produced in Bosnia and shot in Slovenia, its cast and crew are drawn from the neighborhood of the hostilities. These people knew the evil firsthand -- well enough to look for the (dark) humor in it.

"No Man's Land" takes place over the course of a beautiful summer day. A Bosnian patrol is caught short on the wrong side of the lines, and only two soldiers survive the barrage: Tchiki (Branko Djuric), a chain-smoking hothead in a Rolling Stones T-shirt, and his friend Tsera (Filip Sovagovic), the rational half of the duo. They crawl into a trench between the lines and hunker down.

A Serbian patrol is sent to find them. One of them plants a mine under the unconscious Tsera, and is shot by Chiki; his thoroughly green comrade, Nino (Rene Bitorajac), survives. Tchiki spares him, perhaps out of loneliness, and promptly begins arguing the root of the conflict with him.

"What the hell made you ruin this beautiful country?" demands Tchiki. "You wanted to separate, not us," Nino says. "Because you started the war!" Chiki exclaims.

They bicker like children until Tchiki points his gun at Nino: "Who started the war?"

Similar to Robert Altman's "M*A*S*H," you laugh because it's funny, and you think because you're allowed to think. You can look hard at both sides without fear of being hit by stray bullets.

What becomes immediately apparent is that neither side really knows what they're doing there, and the two soldiers form an uneasy alliance to get rescued by U.N. peacekeeping forces ("The Smurfs," they call them derisively). A U.N. sergeant, Marchand, ignores orders and sets out to retrieve them, and in doing so sets off a media circus.

The media aspect of "No Man's Land" is the only part of the film that feels false, but only because Tanovic allows the newscasters to explain the reasons behind the conflict. While the reasons given are politically accurate, they go against everything we're learning in the trench: mainly, there are no reasons.

"No Man's Land" is a smart picture, and the most worthy war picture of the last year. It is human, more so than the dreadful "Harrison's Flowers" and much more so than "Black Hawk Down," which reduced men to robots. Tanovic tells the story the way it needs to be told, befriending the hapless men on both sides. That's more than the op-ed page ever did.