Angelina Jolie’s ‘In the Land of Blood and Honey’ a noble venture that falls short - Entertainment, Movies - Navy Times

Angelina Jolie’s ‘In the Land of Blood and Honey’ a noble venture that falls short

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, so they say.

With “In the Land of Blood and Honey,” writer and director Angelina Jolie (behind the camera only this time) has chosen instead to take the path right through hell, which in this case takes the form of the Bosnian War. Her intentions are sterling — to show the horror of the conflict visited upon all sides involved — and her direction is sure. On the other hand, the story feels forced at times, its tone oddly mismatched at others. Still, Jolie has chosen a complex subject for her feature debut as a writer and director, and if it’s not perfect, it’s not for lack of trying.

The film begins with Ajla (Zana Marjanovic), an artist, preparing for a date with Danijel (Goran Kostic), a policeman. They are shy around each other but obviously share an attraction. The evening goes well, with dancing, when the club they’re in is ripped apart by an explosion.

The war is on. Ajla is a Bosnian Muslim, and over the coming weeks she and the other women in town are rounded up and bused to a camp by Serbian soldiers. The soldiers shoot a man on a sidewalk with casual disregard along the way. The women are terrified, as well they might be. When they arrive at the camp, the soldiers immediately make clear the situation the women find themselves in: The soldiers begin raping them, in public. A soldier grabs Ajla and is about to assault her when he is stopped — by Danijel, who is the Serbian officer who runs the camp. Yes, a handy plot device and a bit of a stretch. But it’s the set-up for the remainder of the film.

Danijel protects Ajla from the other soldiers, though not from other forms of brutality that the soldiers mete out — he can’t afford to give their secret away. When she is summoned to his quarters they begin a sexual relationship, despite their differences. This is a political conflict, he argues. You are killing my people, she responds. And yet the affair continues. Whether he is exercising a sick sort of power or she is simply trying to stay alive is not clear, maybe not even to them at first. It is certainly a twisted relationship. Jolie goes to great lengths to show that everything is twisted, that the war has perverted everything about normal life, destroyed any semblance of sanity.

We get a brief explanation of the Serbian side of things from Danijel’s father, a cantankerous general (Rade Serbedzija), who goes to great lengths to try to justify the ethnic cleansing. Later Danijel installs Ajla as a sort of camp artist. He attempts to hide the true nature of their relationship from his father, but rumors persist, and for all of his homicidal leanings, the general is not a stupid man.

There are no happy endings in war, and Jolie doesn’t pretend otherwise. The Bosnian War was filled with unimaginable atrocities, and as a director Jolie does not skimp on showing representative samples. This is no movie-star-wants-to-direct vanity project. This is clearly something close to Jolie’s heart, and it shows.

Where “In the Land of Blood and Honey” falls short, then, is in the story itself. Too many coincidences and, ultimately, too narrow a focus. But it is a genuinely noble effort, a worthy attempt to make some sense of the inexplicable.