No Man's Land opens with
a shot of a Bosnian relief patrol trying to break through the
stalemate of trench warfare though a nighttime attack on a Serbian
hilltop position. The attack fails and the survivors retreat to the
trench. When two Serbian soldiers enter the trench in order to do a
recon mission, gunfight breaks out. After the gunfire has stopped,
all that remains is one wounded Serbian soldier, and two wounded
Bosnians, one of whom is trapped in a horrendous, and seemingly
insurmountable, situation. The Bosnian soldier, Ciki (Branko Djuri),
and the Serbian soldier, Nino (Rene Bitorajac), alternate between
gaining an advantage over the other and exchanging empathy along
with cigarettes. During the uneasy course of their trench-based détente,
a French sergeant (Georges Siatidis) who is attached to a United
Nations peacekeeping detail, takes the initiative and tries to halt
the rapidly degrading conditions that are unfolding in the trench,
finding his way blocked at every turn by both the military and UN
bureaucracy. Assisting the sergeant is a Christiane Amanpour wannabe
(Katrin Cartlidge) who at first seems more interested in feeding
scoops into the insatiable maw of her twenty-four-hour news network
than in providing in humanitarian assistance. The head of the UN
peacekeeping forces, a presumably updated, but no less intolerable,
version of Colonel Blimp (Simon Callow) seems more interested in
playing all types of games with his secretary than in solving this
particular crisis. While on the telephone with the officer, the
sergeant is told that he must obtain approval from some of his
superior officers before talking to the General, and this may take
some time; several of them are at a conference in Geneva on media
relations! Playing to the media, rather than discovering and
controlling the root causes of the problem, is perceived by those at
the top to be the best way to proceed; it's certainly less bloody
and controversial -- or is it? As the UN peacekeeping bureaucracy is
prodded and threatened into doing something, the situation in the
trench swings wildly from near-destruction to uneasy camaraderie and
back again.
Before directing No Man's Land,
director Danis Tanovic worked as a frontline cameraman in the
Bosnian army, and the difference between the look of No Man's
Land, and the typical Hollywood version of war (Steven
Spielberg's recreation of the events at Normandy in Saving
Private Ryan being the most remarkable exception to date) is
immediately apparent . Like the great photographers of World War Two
-- such as Robert Capa and Abe Rosenthal -- Tanovic and his
cinematographer, Walther Vanden Ende, freeze the images of war into
cold relief. The audience is never allowed to avoid the point that
those images have been bought with gallons of blood (even in
Rosenthal's famous picture of the American flag being raised on
Mount Suribashi after the miserable battle to regain Iwo Jima, the
image of heroism contains both strength and weariness, reaction and
action).
No Man's Land also
incorporates, as expected, the now calcified, if accurate,
observation that war is an insane act, usually undertaken at the
first act of provocation by politicians who are greedy, insecure,
sadistic, ideologically fanatical, or all of the above, but takes
the argument into a more detailed, hence psychologically tidy,
realm. On the surface, No Man's Land is to the war in the
Balkans what Remarque's book, All Quiet on the Western Front,
and Kubrick's film, Paths of Glory, were to the depiction of
World War I: a scathing indictment of the destruction of life by
thoughtless generals, and of bureaucratic corruption. But Tanovic is
also interested in the microcosm of war and how it is instigated on
an individual level, when tribal identity morphs into chauvinism and
when multiplied within a given populace, is as much to blame for
warmongering as the inflammatory rhetoric of any number of
politicians and generals. Remarque's book, and Lewis Milestone's
1930 adaptation of it, use a right-wing schoolteacher as a singular
symbolic representation of this mindset, but Tanovic's recasting of
this symbolism - allowing the same words of hate to pour forth from
both sides on a wider scale- makes the hatred appear less an
exception than a rule; no one is an innocent here. It's hardly an
original observation on the state of human psychology in the midst
of combat, but No Man's Land cuts through any sense of
redundancy by coating a traditional anti-war narrative framework
with sardonic humor and an outcome that is kept in flux until the
final frame. As one soldier explains to the other the difference
between a wartime optimist and a wartime pessimist, the explanation
at first might seem trite; the setting, and the circumstances under
which it is spoken, are not at enough of a historical distance for
comfort. The twentieth century has seen one too many "wars to
end all wars," and any illusions of the potential for human
perfectibility can't be rectified by filtering it through the morass
of outrage and pity. To paraphrase eighteen-century English
politician David Burke, the heedless and naïve pursuit of a
well-meaning, "better" way to conduct political life does
not automatically lead to liberty; rather, the refusal to
contemplate possible outcomes of attempting to create utopias might
just lead to greater evils than the ones just eradicated.
The source of Tanovic's attitude, and, consequently, the film's attitude toward war, is immediately traceable to the often sad conditions that have been central to the development of Central European history. Always cursed by geography, a problem which has been abetted by totalitarian and/or incompetent leadership, Poland, Hungary, et al. have all too frequently been the battleground and/or plaything of whatever set of conquerors have been on the march at any given time; consequently, attitudes towards war and oppression in these countries are reflected in the countries that make up that region as a blend of anger, black humor and detachment -- a useful mentality for surviving the inevitable. There is no potential for optimism while living in this state of ironic flux. In No Man's Land, the pitiless nature of truth must win out if humanity is to conquer its own worst tendencies.