Slender Threads: Angelina Jolie’s “In the Land of Blood and Honey”

Angelina Jolie’s first outing as a writer and director is nothing if not ambitious: a historical drama of the 1990s Bosnian war employing Bosnian and Serb actors speaking the local BCS (Bosnian/Serb/Croatian) language. Historically compelling, the film is redolent with the kind of harrowing details found in Peter Mass’, Chuck Sudetic’s, Laura Silber’s, and Alan Little’s accounts of the Bosnian genocide. On a more personal level, the movie’s central relationship parallels the one at the heart of Ang Lee’s Lust/Caution: a volatile affair between a man and a woman on opposite sides of a civil war. But In the Land of Blood and Honey never achieves the emotional coherence or intensity of Lee’s film. Rather, its metier is the broader picture, a vivid revelation of social collapse–in a place and time closer (the film seems to say) than the viewer cares to admit. Ultimately, one may choose to take Jolie’s two-layered narrative as a needful reminder not only of postwar Bosnia’s plight, but of the frailty of all human covenants.