The Impressive No Man's Land Is Simple, Elegant, Blunt and Humane; Majid Majidi Is Iran's Spielberg
A scene early in No Man's Land brilliantly sums up the agony and absurdity of war. In a godforsaken trench somewhere in Bosnia, two men?an armed Bosnian soldier, Ciki (Branko Djuric), and an unarmed Serb soldier, Nino (Rene Bitorajac)?hide on either side of a doorway, waiting for a distant Serbian armored division to cease shelling them.
The men had no intention of working together. In fact, they'd gladly kill each other if given the chance, and there's only one reason the Bosnian didn't instantly kill the Serb: the Bosnian's wounded comrade (Filip Sovagovic) is lying motionless on top of a Serb mine that will explode unless somebody defuses it.
As death rains down, the men squabble about which side started this mess. The question resolves itself when the Bosnian points his rifle at the Serb and demands, "Who started the war?" "We did," the unarmed Serb responds. Later in the film, the rifle changes ownership, and the Serb asks the now-unarmed Bosnian the same question: "Who started the war?" "We did," the Bosnian says.
In war films, sometimes the simplest devices are the most rewarding. No Man's Land, a brutal, moving, unexpectedly funny film from Bosnian writer-director Danis Tanovic, is a treasure trove of simple devices working together to express an amazing number of contradictory true feelings about war. The trench, which is located between Bosnian and Serb positions, is both a physical location and a symbol fraught with larger meanings: a border between two ethnic groups, two groups of combatants and two modes of thought; a hiding place where those conflicting forces can temporarily disappear. The periodic handing-off of the rifle distills the idea of history being written by the winners. The problem is, history's still going on?and in a civil war, there are no winners, only survivors.
The war in the former Yugoslavia has been portrayed in many movies, including Before the Rain, Welcome to Sarajevo and Behind Enemy Lines, which opened last week. No Man's Land is at once smaller and more comprehensive than its predecessors. Previous films on this topic have approached it from a global perspective?from the outside looking in. (Even Before the Rain, a haunting triptych of Macedonia war stories by Milcho Manchevski, internationalized its subject by setting the middle tale in London.)
No Man's Land acknowledges the global consequences of civil war by transforming the trench incident into an international news story, overseen by a French UN peacekeeping unit and reported live by a posse of cable news teams. (Katrin Cartlidge, who also appeared in Before the Rain, plays the Christiane Amanpour-type war correspondent.) But with occasional exceptions, the film stays in and near the trench. Cinematographer Walther Vanden Ende keeps his lens mostly at or below ground level, frequently limiting our perspective to whatever his trench-bound subjects can see, switching point of view depending on who's in control of events at any given moment.
This visual strategy suggests a leveling of political discourse; it tells the viewer, "Let's all come down to earth now, and think about how individuals actually experience war." While the script's central concept lends itself to Beckett-style abstraction (an alternate title might have been Waiting for the West), No Man's Land refuses to treat its characters as human chess pieces. Unlike Stanley Kubrick, director of another great trench warfare film, Paths of Glory, Tanovic has empathy; he's interested not only in the forces that drive men to kill, but the humanity that continues to exist beneath all the killing. A shot soldier's pilfered wallet contains a prescription and a gay porn postcard; Ciki wears a dirt-smeared Rolling Stones t-shirt. A sweet-faced boy with an accordion approaches the UN team and plays "Frere Jacques" until one of the soldiers gives him a pack of cigarettes to make him go away.
The complexity and humanity of No Man's Land is a stark contrast to Behind Enemy Lines, a flashy Hollywood combat picture that pretends to be genuinely interested in the same conflict, and has a few fine, horrific passages, yet ultimately treats the citizens of the former Yugoslavia mainly as abstractions, as Vietnamese have traditionally been treated in American movies about the war in Indochina. The inhabitants of the film's war zone exist mainly to awaken Lieut. Chris Burnett's (Owen Wilson)dormant sense of mercy; the "good" Bosnians who give Burnett refuge validate the hero's awakening outrage; the Serbs are the movie's Nazis-of-the-moment, glowering in gloomy rooms and stalking Burnett through wintry wastelands like flesh-and-blood Terminators.
Early on, the hero admits he joined the Navy because he wanted to punch a Nazi in the face; by the end of the film, he more or less gets his wish. Compare this cartoon nonsense to Steven Spielberg's Nazis in Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan; those films acknowledged the enemy's unfathomable evil while insisting on their humanity, and the difference between commercial pretense and genuine pop artistry becomes crystal clear. No Man's Land recognizes that flash is the enemy of thought, and it keeps things simple, elegant, blunt, humane; it works as a fable, a political thriller, a black comedy and a war picture, and from any angle, it's impressive.
Like other Majidi films, including Children of Heaven and The Color of Paradise, Baran is bound to be written off as insubstantial because it dares to universalize its story, and tell it in clean, classically shaped sequences moviegoers around the world can appreciate and engage with.
Set at a Teheran construction site, it tells the story of a teenage Iranian named Lateef (Hossein Abedini) who works as a gofer and cook for the other men, a mixed team of Iranians and Afghans. Most of the latter are in the country illegally; despite the kindness of their Iranian foreman, Memar (Mohammed Reza Naji), who holds on to most of the men's wages and doles out just enough to help them pay the bills, the Afghans are viewed by Iranian society in much the same way that illegal Mexican laborers are viewed in the American Southwest: with a mix of distaste, distrust and paternalistic kindness. When a 40ish Afghan is injured on the site, his son Rahmat (Zahra Bahrami) takes his place, and soon gets Lateef's job. Lateef resents Rahmat until he learns that Rahmat is actually a girl named Baran pretending to be a boy.
Tongue-tied by his own infatuation, Lateef becomes the girl's unseen admirer and protector, helping her even when he cannot help himself. Like a great Italian Neorealist movie, Baran takes its characters and situations from reality, then fortifies them with suspense, humor and sudden reversals of fate. A few of the plot contrivances are nearly Chaplinesque in their improbability?somehow, Lateef always manages to arrive in Baran's life moments before something incredibly important happens to her?but considering Majidi's immense craft and empathy, that's a minor complaint. So is the unfortunate absence of any female characters who match the men in complexity; I suspect that came with the territory. Iran's ambivalent feelings toward Afghanistan, and the entire Islamic world's prickly, often repressive relationship with women, ensures that both Baran and its goodhearted hero can only get so close to the dispossessed. At the end of the movie, the girl lifts her veil and quickly lowers it again; the image recurs in Mohsen Makhmalbaf's more problematic Afghanistan odyssey Kandahar, which my colleague Armond White will discuss in more detail next week.
Framed
The Business of Strangers is well-made, funny and frequently engrossing, but its tale of a friendship-of-circumstance between two women (CEO Stockard Channing and her would-be sidekick and protege, Julia Stiles) starts out smart and real, then degenerates into a predictably "outrageous" and "disturbing" revenge plot, directed against a presumed rapist (Frederick Weller). Channing is probably guaranteed to win some awards for her much-praised lead performance, and she is terrific, as usual; it's a shame her efforts are in service to yet another story about a mature female executive who's lonely, childless, empty and desperately unhappy despite her career success. Movies should get beyond this convenient stereotype? especially supposedly adventurous indie flicks written by men.