No Man's Land

I got hold of this DVD after a friend of mine bemoaned the lack of exposure in the western media to Serbian cinema. I readily admitted that I had no real knowledge of Serbian cinema, the only things even vaguely connected to the Balkans I could think of off the top of my head are the Romanian film "4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days" and "A Serbian Film" - so that's a film set in Romania (so not Slavic) and a film with has a plot synopsis so awful I'm not going to talk about it any further.

So, not much exposure to Serbian films indeed. 'No Man's Land' is a black comedy set during the war years in the ruins of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. Serbian and Bosnian troops face off against each other, two Bosnians and one Serbian soldier become trapped in a trench in no-man's land. One of the Bosnians is stuck on top of a mine that will kill them all if he moves, the other two have a gun each but are also injured and so agree to a truce until the UN can come to their aid.

Following this set up is an engaging farce in which French UN soldiers try to help the men while dealing with the bureaucracy of NATO. The media on the ground implore the soldiers to help the men, but their paymasters are only after a good story. The commanders of the Bosnian and Serb troops on each side seem indifferent to the men stuck in no-man's land while the men at the centre of all this confusion continue to argue and bicker about the war and whose fault it is. I don't think this takes a genius to decode this as an allegory for Yugoslavia itself; where the man stuck on the mine represents the nation as a whole, unable to move with changing times for fear of setting off a political bomb, while the nations of Serbia and Bosnia work themselves into an ecstasy of rage about each other before finally resorting to violence. All the while the world's media, NATO and the UN look on and try to help - but ultimately are unable. Perhaps it's the bureaucratic nature of the outsiders that prevents them, perhaps it's because no outsider truly understands the nature being Slavic. Perhaps though (as I think is hinted in the film) neither the Serb nor the Bosnian armies get any help because neither do anything to deserve it - they're agents of their own destruction constantly plotting each other's downfalls while the world looks on and sighs.

A lot of comedy mileage is made out of the language barriers between the protagonists, as well as the at-best incompetence and at-worst downright dangerousness of the people 'in charge' in the former Yugoslavia. It's a film that's very funny and provides (I hope) an insight into a conflict that we in Western Europe only ever really see through Kate Aidie style newsreels.