Review of No Man's Land (2001) by Marshallv — 08 May 2018

No Man’s Land is a comedy/war film directed by Danis Tanovic about the very complicated situation in Bosnia involving the war. While this movie is comical, we felt it could offend someone of Bosnian culture who has any past ties with the war.

Something as detrimental as the Bosnian War isn’t something that necessarily you wanna make a joke about. While the movie had some decent comedy, I feel it doesn’t touch on the important parts of the Bosnian War.

This movie starts off with a group of Bosnian soldiers as they’re crossing a field and they stop to take a rest but are quickly ambushed by a group of Serbian soldiers camped upon a hill. One of the Bosnian soldiers escapes the area and rolls in a trench.

He starts to bandage himself up after he was shot in the arm and he hears 2 Serbian soldiers looking in the area and they plant a bouncing betty under a dead body incase any Bosnian soldiers try to take the body away.

The Bosnian soldier eventually comes out and shoots the captain then holds the other one at gunpoint. He’s a bit of a awkward man, bald and his character is comedic because of just how outlandish he is in this war.

Like how he is so, quirky unlike everyone else who has such a serious tone. It’s quite the contrast of personalities between the Serbian soldier and the Bosnian Soldier. Shortly after, the Bosnian soldier makes the Serbian soldier take off his clothes for humiliation and wave a white flag as he ran across the field.

The Serbians see him and don’t recognize him so they try to mortar strike the area and they hide in this bunker together. After this, they have a serious argument about who started the war. Shortly after the argument, the guy who was presumed dead and placed on a bouncing betty, wakes up and they immediately warn him not to move as there is a bomb underneath him.

They sit there arguing some more and they don’t really do anything cause they really can’t. They eventually call the UN for a bomb squad and they check but they basically say they can’t do anything about it.

This enrages the Bosnian guy and he shoots the Serbian guy but then the UN shoots the Bosnian guy and they peace the scene. The movie ends with them laying there. The funny parts of this movie were in the interaction between the Serbian and Bosnian soldier.

While it doesn’t slander the horrors of the Bosnian War, it still makes it seem so fabricated in the arguments. I have a odd feeling that they wouldn’t be that civil. Besides the interaction between the soldiers, I think the representation of the UN that they had were very accurate as they were portrayed as people who were in the middle and really didn’t care about what was going on between both sides.

Also the brutality of the war is showed vividly, more importantly in the scene where they are mortar striking the Serbian soldier even though they didn’t even check to see if he was a comrade or a enemy.