No man’s land.

” The war was never a good sub­ject for a fea­ture film. But frankly, my deep­est opin­ion is it’s not the sub­ject that mat­ters, it’s the way you treat the sub­ject that mat­ters.” — Direc­tor Danis Tanovic.

His­tory always have spe­cific pieces of land in dis­pute, where in two countries/states claim the own­er­ship. There are so many exam­ples like Kash­mir, Kachatheevu, Sikkim, Bel­gaum [ inter states ]. This is com­mon and every nation has its own no man’s land. This film is based one such NML in Bosn­ian and Serb bor­der. I would like to use the famous dia­log of ‘Flags of our fathers’

“Every jack­ass thinks he knows what war is.. Espe­cially those who’ve never been in. We like things nice and sim­ple, good and evil, heroes and vil­lains. There are plenty of both. Most of the time, they are not who we think they are ”

May be, when­ever I come across any war based movies, I quote this dia­log. Because the truth is war is just one more genre of movie for us. How­ever, the movies make us to think more than when we read a news/book or going through a debate. There are 2 sets of peo­ple involved in the war. The author­i­ties who decide when n where to attack and the other set of peo­ple who just fol­low the orders in the name of country/God/King.

The other impor­tant aspect f this film is land mine. [ தின‌த்த‌ந்தில‌ வ‌ருமே.. இளம் க‌வ‌ர்ச்சி க‌ன்னி வெடி ஸ்ரேயா‍‍ன்னு.. அதில்லை.. இது கண்ணி வெடி. :) ]. The total land mines planted in the world as per a read­ing are around 100 mil­lion. Don’t worry, if you don’t under­stand where Bosnia is and Why they fight with Serbs; it doesn’t mat­ter. You can think of any two fight­ing orga­ni­za­tions and watch this movie. After all, we don’t worry much about who dies at the end. Also, don’t antic­i­pate this as a doc­u­men­tary explain­ing why they fight and expect the fight to con­clude at the end with ‘Malar­odu malar ingu’ as in BOMBAY.

No Man’s land/2001/Bosnian
Writ­ten & Directed by Danis Tanovic.
Music : Danis Tanovic

Story

A group of Bosni­ans trav­el­ling to their other camp, miss thier way out and get trapped in their enemy ter­ri­tory. After a clash, one of the Bosn­ian [ Chiki ] of them escape and hide in a trench. To con­firm the fin­ish of intrusion,2 serbs are sent to the the trench. They find one another Bosn­ian [ Cera ] and cap­ture him inthe trench. To play, the serb plants a ‘bounc­ing mine’ under Cera. The idea is if Cera moves or moved, then the mine will explode mak­ing an impact within a greater radius. This depicts a prob­lem and the per­son­nel hid­ing in the trench. 2 Bosians and 2 Serbs with guns. Each one of them believes that they are right. What do they do is the first part of the story.

The next part involves UNPROFOR [ United Nations Pro­tec­tion Force ] and a news channel’s Eng­lish reporter who antic­i­pates for some break­ing news or live event in the unmanned place. What hap­pens is the story and to my sur­prise, it has the utmost turns and twists, max­i­mum pos­si­ble with this min­i­mal scope of the story.

View :

It is very easy to turn this script into a com­mer­cial action thriller types with Will Smith or some hero suc­cess­fully com­pletes the mis­sion [ in the end kiss­ing the news reporter :) ]. That might have enter­tained us but never makes us to think or read fur­ther. The thin line divert­ing from action thriller makes this war drama a mem­o­rable one. The movie ques­tions a lot. A good cin­ema makes the audi­ence to think or refer some­thing after watch­ing the movie.

The direc­tor is from Bosnia and sur­pris­ingly this doesn’t lead him to make a biased movie. Instead, he shows how UN works. He treated the sub­ject with humor sprin­kled in the movie. Every scene has an inter­est­ing twist or at least a lead to some­thing else. The pain, pride, friend­ship, enmity among the sol­diers are shown visu­ally and with dia­logues. Things which the Serbs do [ plant­ing mine under Cera ], lead to many com­pli­ca­tions. The involve­ment of UN sol­diers, their restric­tions in unknown fields and their bureao­cratic lead­ers sit­ting in high com­mand offices, mak­ing their spon­ta­neous deci­sions [ pass­ing the buck ! ] are sub­tly inserted in the story.

The Global News chan­nel reporter is fan­tas­ti­cally cap­tured [ couldn’t resist think­ing of our NDTV/IBN/Times reporters antic­i­pat­ing break­ing news or live events ]. As a news machine, she wants to tape every­thing on the war ground. For media, it’s just the news. The involve­ment of lay­ers like army supe­ri­ors, UN army, UN supe­ri­ors, news reporters change the course of action. So what­ever we see or read as the news is def­i­nitely not the truth or as it is exactly hap­pened. It is applic­a­ble right from the life of Kings to the recent hap­pen­ing in Sri­lanka. We assume that we know the truth which actu­ally may not be.

Though the movie depicts this sit­u­a­tion with humor, I would not want to divert the read­ers that this as a lighter movie. It’s a kind of black com­edy [ Ex : enna elavu kazhu­vara keiy­ila thin­ganum.. avlo dhaan — Esakki in Devar Mahan ]. The Bosn­ian and Serb sol­dier con­front in many places and some­times find com­mon things between them.

The argu­ments the sol­diers have, the prob­lems of Cera lying on the mine, their wish to smoke, Cera try­ing to take a leak, cold-blooded UN oper­a­tions, inhu­man hunger for news by the media and so many other aspects leave us stunned. Cin­e­matog­ra­phy and sound edit­ing are the notable work in this movie. Sud­den gun shots, bomb­ing walk­ing on gravel — all such minute sounds are per­fectly used.

Con­clu­sion

This movie won the acad­emy award for the best for­eign lan­guage film in 2001. As I men­tioned, the war con­cept shown is uni­ver­sally true and peo­ple from any part of the globe can relate the story with the war, they know — this can range any­thing from Hogenakkal water issue to Israel-Palestenian con­flict.[ Pazham vere.. aana prach­nai onnu dhaan :) ].

A won­der­ful war drama which has to be defin­tely in your list of movies.

“கொலை குத்த‌ம்னா.. யுத்த‌மும் குத்த‌ம். Isn’t it ?!” — Sri­ram Abhayankar. [ If you ask me who’s this, I’ll bet­ter stop writ­ing about cinema !!! ].

–Toto.

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