This movie plays like a primary school lesson on ethnic strife in Bosnia. Parts of it could have been named "Bosnian War for Dummies".
It's made with uninformed and generally disinterested Western audience in mind and it's as if Tanovic is saying: "Look, I know it's a drag to go out and look for serious material on ethnic groups you've barely heard of, fighting over a godforsaken piece of land you probably can't pick out on the map, so here's a condensed & simplified version that will make you think you now understand what went on in Bosnia during the early 1990s."
With his way too broad a brush he attempts many things. Among them:
- touching on the seeds of conflict between Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Muslims (who now days prefer to be called Bosniacks and in this movie are referred to as Bosnians),
- explaining the role of international community through UN's UNPROFOR contingent,
- conveying the hopelessness and chaos of war, etc, etc.. .
With some of them he's more successful than with others. For example, in the beginning, chaos and confusion of an armed conflict are quite vividly and successfully laid out. In so many other war flicks soldiers shout orders, move troops on a whim and generally look firmly in control at every moment. Well, here, most aren't really sure what to do. They doubt their decisions and seem to re-evaluate their involvement in this mess with every new gruesome event. This definitely rings more true. Civil wars certainly don't come with rulebooks and how-to guides.
Other parts of the movie, however, can be viewed as personal political statements. I didn't exactly expect Tanovic, himself a Muslim and a soldier in the Bosnian Muslim Army during the war, to entirely stay clear of this, but even so, I thought he'd concentrate more on human stories and less on scoring points for his side. As it is, he portrays Serbs pretty cartoonishly and same goes for the portrayal of UNPROFOR and Western media. Dialogues invloving these 3 groups are so weak and one-dimensional they literally sound like something out of 'Full House' or other "lets state the obvious since our audience is too stupid" sitcoms.
Also, there's a whole lot of second layer, cheap and childish propaganda that's probably going to go unnoticed by most Western eyes, but it's most definitely present. Men on Serbian lines (played by Slovene extras) are shown as overweight, greasy, hateful, English-language-illiterate boorish pigs who seem to communicate through backslaps and inarticulate grunts, whereas Muslims are clean-cut, cheerful, fashionably retro polyglots who fight a war in 'Rolling Stones' T-shirt and Chuck Taylor All-Stars while quiping about global issues. No doubt who the beauty and who the beast is in Tanovic's eyes.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in a scene when Muslim soldier picks through pockets of a dead Serb troop whom he had just killed. Camera zooms in to show us that he found a photo of a naked guy striking a sexy pose in dead Serb's wallet! At first I thought there might be a payoff to this later on, but it never happened which left me wondering as to what exactly was Tanovic trying to say/imply? Since Serbs are implicitly presented as bad guys, I suppose he's delivering the final insult, which in his world means - showing their gayness!?
Still, most of Tanovic's wrath is saved for international community and its military arm - UNPROFOR. His thinly veiled position seems to be that the international community should have taken the Muslim side in Bosnia by helping them (not only in humanitarian aid, but in arms, too) fight the other two, better equipped sides (Croats were in this civil war as well, though the movie makes no mention of them).
That is definitely a first - an "anti-war" movie that advocates more armed involvement.
Tanovic again lets his emotions get the better of him and goes way over the top by portraying most of the official foreign element in Bosnia somewhere in the range between incompetent, clueless retards and amoral (bordering on sinister) worms.
I mention all this due to the fact that this film is being marketed as another "Catch-22" - supposedly showing all of the absurdity and senslesness of war. And while it does that in certain part, it is also much more of a soapbox for Tanovic to air his, obviously subjective, views on a conflict he took an active part in.
"No Man's Land" possesses certain redeemable value but tries to be too many things at the same time, many of which ultimately dilute and diminish its anti-war message.
Srdjan Dragojevic's "Pretty Village, Pretty Flame" did a better job at this since Dragojevic didn't take part in the actual fighting, but was close enough to feel its gruesome effects. That meant his movie wasn't burdened and hindered by heavy personal baggage, which is something that can't be said for Tanovic.
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