Welcome to Sarajevo - Review

Interview, July, 1999 by Graham Fuller

His name is Risto and, as played by actor Goran Visnjic, he's a handsome, friendly (if rueful) young Bosnian who's found a job driving a British news crew around Sarajevo during the Serb bombardment. When we first meet him he's being serenaded, as he scurries across a stretch of wasteland, by the brooding Stone Roses anthem "I Wanna Be Adored." He's carrying water bottles and he's going home to shave. Toward the end of the film, Michael Winterbottom's Welcome to Sarajevo, Risto is matter-of-factly shot dead in his flat by sniper fire. All his human needs are extinguished - just like that. Other atrocities are depicted in the 1997 movie, some involving babies and children, but the use of "I Wanna Be Adored," a vulgar sop to the commercial viability of the soundtrack though it is, keeps Risto running across that blighted terrain with his water bottles, a guy going nowhere fast forever.

Neither Welcome to Sarajevo nor Peter Antonijevic's graphic Savior, which features Dennis Quaid as an American mercenary fighting for the Serbs, created a fraction of the interest among U.S. audiences last year that Saving Private Ryan or The Thin Red Line did. But those Hollywood epics are set in the "safe" past of World War II. And they're combat films that, except briefly in Saving Private Ryan, show the suffering of civilian populations no more than does The Phantom Menace. Driven by the Serbian policy of ethnic cleansing, the late war in Bosnia and the current one in Kosovo are wars against people, so it's unlikely that the isolationist American film industry will have anything to do with them anytime soon.

Still, Bosnian and Yugoslav filmmakers won't be silenced, and their works are finding outlets in this country. The spring's Thessaloniki USA Film Festival at New York City's Anthology Film Archives screened an array of recent Greek and Balkan cinema, including the Bosnian An Unexpected Walk, directed by Francois Lunel, and Serbian director Goran Paskaljevic's The Powder Keg - two very different, remarkable movies. The Powder Keg, which opens next month, also played at June's Human Rights Watch festival in Manhattan. It was accompanied by Crime and Punishment, a chilling documentary about the slaughter of ten thousand Muslims by Serbian Chetniks following the fall of Srebrenica in 1995, and Soldier's Bride, a short film about a raped Bosnian woman trying to scrub away her violation that makes grimly poetic use of slow-motion and dissolves.

An Unexpected Walk was filmed, astonishingly, during the siege of Sarajevo in the summer of 1993. If Welcome to Sarajevo, based on British journalist Michael Nicholson's book about his rescue and adoption of a Bosnian war orphan, is authentic and unsentimental for an Anglo-American film, An Unexpected Walk is the real thing - or as close to the real thing as a stark, verite drama can get. It doesn't have the Stone Roses, but it does have its own Risto figure - Senad (played by Senad Basic), a gaunt soldier with a Gary Cooperish look. At the start of the film, he's released from the Sarajevo military hospital where he's been for four months. We watch him make his way across the city, hiding in a bombed-out building when enemy planes fly above, their muffled roar this movie's soundtrack.

Senad's war wound has left him with corrosion of the brain - he's funny and articulate, but unable to perform the simplest tasks. He and his girlfriend Senka (Vanesa Glodo) move tentatively toward each other. At first, she just bathes his head. The scene (echoed when her sister-in-law gently douses him later on) is a ritual purification. But it carries ironic overtones of the most iconographically nationalistic of Yugoslav paintings, Uros Predic's 1919 The Kosovo Girl, which shows a maid succoring with wine the dying Serbian warlord Lazar after the 1389 battle of Kosovo that led to the eclipse of Serbia's medieval empire and inspired 610 years of revenge.

Later, Senad and Senka fool around after making love (if there's a sexier scene in any American movie being released this year, we'll know all about it). But when Senka, in the bathroom, hears Senad warbling like a child alone in bed, a shadow passes over her face. His doom seems assured from that moment. Like Risto, he goes to fetch water under the threat of fire - the errand to hell and (hopefully) back that Sarajevans faced daily during the siege - but fails. Senka's brother sends him back that night, when it's most dangerous, and at the water tank he performs what can only be described as a Bosnian equivalent of an American Plains Indian death song. The end comes the next day, but not from a bullet.

Much of An Unexpected Walk was filmed in long shot, which maximizes the vulnerability of poor Senad and other errand-runners and shoppers in the streets and parks of Sarajevo - we see them from a similar perspective, if with opposite emotions, as Serbian snipers must have as they peered at them through their gun sights. Figuratively speaking, The Powder Keg enables us to look back down the rifle barrels to see the Serbs of Belgrade - along with some hapless Muslim refugees - magnified in Brobdingnagian close-up.