Film Review: Bosnia drama 'In the Land of Blood and Honey' a well-meaning but inadequate debut for Jolie

Film District

Bosnian actress Zana Marjanovic and Serb star Goran Kostic are lovers in "In the Land of Blood and Honey."

Angelina Jolie is an actress of "physical perfection" (according to Vogue magazine) as well as a celebrated humanitarian (she's a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees). She combines her profession and her passion to make her narrative feature debut as a writer-director with "In the Land of Blood and Honey," a sincere and ambitious yet inadequate movie inspired by what an onscreen legend describes as "the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II," the war in Bosnia.

A work that affirms its earnestness and integrity with its casting (the actors are natives of the former Yugoslavia) and its subtitles (the film is in Bosnian and Serbian, with English subtitles), "In the Land of Blood and Honey" is a sort of modern Holocaust movie. It is not shy in its depiction of "ethnic cleansing and mass atrocities," especially those perpetrated by Christian Serbs against Bosnian Muslim women: Jolie gives us beatings, public rape, the use of "human shields," and so on.

Does a spoonful of honey help the blood go down? The early 1990s conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina —

an eruption of age-old enmities suppressed by Communism and loosed by the splintering of Yugoslavia —

is represented here by the fraught relationship that develops between beautiful Ajla (Bosnian actress Zana Marjanovic), a Muslim slave/prisoner in a Serb army camp, and Danijel (Serb actor Goran Kostic), a soldier and "Serb patriot" torn between his attraction to Ajla and his loyalty to his warmongering officer father (Croatian actor Rade Serbedzija). "It's politics, not murder," Danijel rationalizes during pre-pillow talk with Ajla, who claims she was "raised to know no difference between Serb, Croat and Muslim."

The progressive Ajla is introduced as an artist who paints portraits while listening to rock and roll and caring for an infant -- a modern do-it-all woman in the cosmopolitan metropolis of Sarajevo. The war that interrupts her career and kills her happiness represents a slide back into barbarism, from the knock-at-the-door rousting that heralds mass deportation and execution (a Fascist tactic familiar to Americans from movies about the Nazis), to the scavenging of the refugees and freedom fighters hiding out many months later in the almost Neolithic rubble of the once-proud cities.

Jolie's staging of the action is efficient but unmemorable, and occasionally inappropriate: In the film's most dubious montage, Ajla and Danijel make love while Ajla's sister prisoners are being raped elsewhere on the command post by less progressive soldiers. There's a disconnect between the troubling pragmatism of the lovers' behavior and Jolie's romantic presentation of the story's "forbidden love" hook, even after an espionage plot is introduced, some 90 minutes into the film, to make Ajla more admirable and to send the film toward its grim final twist. Jolie seems eager to embrace her characters, but instead she holds them at arm's length, so her movie will be taken seriously. Somehow, the result seems even less consequential and enlightening than the usual art project about real-life war and genocide.

The movie is exclusively at the Malco Paradiso.

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