"Welcome to Sarajevo"

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Director Michael Winterbottom's "Welcome to Sarajevo" is a rancid and
self-righteous film that reflects the pro-interventionist outlook of
"laptop bombardiers." During the civil war in former Yugoslavia, this
group, which included such notables as NY Times editorialist Anthony Lewis
and cultural critic Susan Sontag, advocated NATO bombing of the Bosnian
Serbs. In their moral calculus, the Muslims stood for European Jewry in the
late 1930s, while the Serbs were the moral and political equivalent of
Hitler's executioners.

Frank Boyce bases his screenplay on British journalist Michael Nicolson's
"Natasha's Story," an account of his attempt to adopt a Bosnian child. He
seeks to spirit her out of Sarajevo to England where he can provide a
pleasant life for her in his comfortable home. This story is supposed to
lift our spirits and make us believe that there is one good human being
left on earth. Stephen Dillane plays the saintly British journalist, whom
we encounter in opening scenes as a prototypical cynical Western television
reporter trying to come up with lurid footage of urban battle casualties.
The reporters in Sarajevo send back footage like this to their studios each
day. Their job is to provide the sort of visceral shock on the evening
world report that stories about tenement fires and auto crashes provide for
local news coverage. Woody Harrelson plays Flynn, a star American
journalist who has a daredevil attitude toward street fighting. As long as
there is gripping footage to be shot, the hard-drinking Flynn will dodge
bullets and be there first. Now that the film has established cynical,
risk-taking, hard-drinking reporters as the central male characters, one
wonders where it can drift next in an ocean of cliché.

The answer to this question is Nina (Marisa Tomei), the head of an
orphanage, and Emira (Emira Nusevic), the fetching young orphan girl he
decides to rescue from the hell of Sarajevo. Nina is everything that the
reporters are not: idealistic, selfless and pure. Which is to say that she
is as lacking in complexity as they are. Emira reminds one of the sort of
children who used to pop up in Hollywood war movies in the 1950s. These
adorable Italian or Korean war orphans are adopted by some grizzled,
war-weary American infantry company after begging for a chocolate bar.
Victor Mature usually plays the Sergeant while Gregory Peck is the
Lieutenant. The children, according to formula, are never German or
Japanese. That would not be marketable.

The Bosnian Serbs, according to the formula of 1950's war movies, are
Terminators put on earth to kill innocent people. God only knows why. They
are ruthless killing machines whom any reasonable, humane person would like
to see destroyed by a NATO bomb. The film version of the British journalist
at one point confesses to a Bosnian Muslim that he feels shame over the
failure of his government to bomb the Serbs into oblivion.

To prove how inhuman the Serbs are, the film includes a horrifying scene. A
bus carrying the orphaned children out of Sarajevo into the safety of Italy
is stopped at gun-point by ranting Serb soldiers. They board the bus and
take Muslim babies with them, presumably to be barbecued and eaten later.
It is astonishing that "Welcome to Sarajevo" puts forward the notion that
the Serb army would exterminate innocent children in this manner. The real
crime of "ethnic cleansing" was beastly enough, but it was designed to
carve out pieces of Bosnian territory in order to exclude one ethnic group
or another, not exterminate them. While the Serbs were certainly more
aggressive than the Muslims, both sides took part in the blood-letting.

A much more powerful scene would have dramatized how Muslim and Serbian
villagers, who lived peacefully for generations, came to the boiling point
and eventually decided to destroy each other. This was not the agenda of
the film-makers who were more interested in a good-versus-evil scenario
rather than the complexities of the Yugoslavia tragedy. The production
notes indicate how little the film's creators understood about Yugoslavian
history. It blames the war on "rivalries between the Serbian, Croatian and
Muslim communities in the region" that "go back centuries."

Catherine Samary observes in "Yugoslavia Dismembered" (Monthly Review,
1995) that peace between various ethnic groups was possible when there was
economic well-being:

"The periods of Yugoslavia's or Bosnia-Herzegovina's greatest cohesion
corresponded to the times when the populations concerned experienced real
gains in living standards and rights. It was by contrast threats to those
gains during the 1980s--not interethnic hatred--that gave rise to
Yugoslavia's fragmentation. The socioeconomic and political crisis of the
1980s was in this respect a turning point."

The author of "Natasha's Story" and the director and screenwriter of
"Welcome to Sarajevo" are not interested in this history of real human
beings. All of Bosnia is simply a backdrop for the narcissistic display of
the British journalist who wants to prove to the world that he is better
than everybody. In a scene that reveals his inability to empathize with the
people of Yugoslavia, he confronts the mother of the child he seeks to
adopt. She is a cigarette-smoking, slatternly woman who nobody in their
right mind would want to put in custody of a child. She has one final phone
conversation with her daughter, who is safe and happy in England, and the
two fail to communicate. Her daughter says that she never wants to come
back to Sarajevo again.

This spells victory for the British journalist, who was anxious that the
mother would regain custody of the child. He is everything that the
unfortunate Yugoslavians are not. He is clean, tobacco-free and sensible.
They, on the other hand, are violent, self-destructive and irrational
chain-smokers. Why can't everybody get a proper public school education
like the protagonist and learn proper, civilized values. This is the
rankest sort of hypocrisy. It was the United States, England and other
European powers that brought down poor Yugoslavia, awash in debt in the
1980s, just as they are bringing down Thailand and Malaysia today.

Someday there might be a film about the tragic civil war in former
Yugoslavia that will probe the causes of the horrible destruction of life
and property. It certainly can't come from writers and directors who are
cocksure of their "civilizing" mandate. Fortunately, NATO bombers never got
involved in the civil war. If they did, it is entirely possible that the
war would have spilled beyond the borders of Yugoslavia and involved the
former Soviet Union in the fighting. As "Welcome to Sarajevo" appears
several years after the conclusion of the war, it  lacks the propaganda
power to spark intensified fighting. As politics, it is retrograde. As
film, it is cliché. This is a movie to avoid.

Louis Proyect