You can hardly accuse Angelina Jolie of taking the easy way out with her first feature-length effort behind the camera — she’s the screenwriter and director. Teeming with genocidal brutality and filmed entirely in the Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian languages, “In the Land of Blood and Honey” is a gruesome love story set during the 1990s war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
A chick flick this is not; nor did Jolie populate the film with celebrity pals.
Instead, it stars a powerfully affecting beauty named Zana Marjanovi as Ajla, a Bosnian Muslim who, on the eve of war, strikes up a flirtation at a club with a Serbian cop, Danijel (Goran Kostic, who resembles Daniel Craig). Soon he becomes a reluctant soldier who joins his father, a general, in the Serbian campaign to exterminate Muslims.
While imprisoned and forced to work in a prison camp where her fellow inmates are being beaten and raped, Ajla renews her acquaintance with Danijel, who is one of her captors. Improbably, they strike up what is depicted as a genuine love affair against the horror backdrop of this mini-Holocaust.
So the film is a head-spinning mix of dead babies and romantic dinners, pillow talk and mass executions. Blood and honey don’t taste right together.
Worse than the stylistic whiplash is Jolie’s lack of interest in exploring the moral rupture of Ajla’s decision to literally sleep with the enemy (a choice that is presented as voluntary, not merely calculated self-preservation). Jolie has Ajla muse, “Sometimes I feel so much guilt for being here with you.” Ya think? Danijel’s side killed her own infant nephew. Danijel himself is shown shooting Muslims.
He claims what’s going on is “politics, not murder,” though it looks a lot closer to the latter. Jolie deserves credit for trying to find the humanity on both sides, but she barely shows what the politics are here, even though the film feels long and repetitive.
Marjanovic’s haunting appeal makes the film watchable even as her character is unfathomable. She barely knows Danijel when the war begins and his role in a barbaric onslaught is unforgivable, not that she would likely be much in the mood for love, considering the cruelty all around her.
Jolie has potential as a director, eschewing camera trickery and showing an exacting eye for desolation as well as sensitivity for actors. Like many a director before her though, she must also master another skill: learning how to fire a writer.