'Shot through the heart' worth seeing

By Devi M. Asmarani

JAKARTA (JP): The irony in the post cold war era often is that in times of conflict, the flood of media coverage tends to make a commodity out of misery and disassociate people from the real tragedy.

Near the end of the four-year ethnic war in Bosnia, TV audiences would flick channels to avoid watching further reports from the war zone.

We could say they were "Bosnia-ed out".

But moviemakers have not left the troublesome Balkans. Not just yet.

After the 1997 Welcome to Sarajevo, a story on the besieged city from the eyes of a British journalist, comes HBO Pictures' Shot Through the Heart.

Both are based on true stories in Sarajevo. The latter is a haunting film, with a heartfelt quality that can alter the audience's view of the war itself.

Shot is an adaptation of on article in America's Details magazine of two childhood buddies, Slavko Simic (Vincent Perez) and Vlado Sarzinsky (Linus Roache), who, because of ethnic differences, were forced to take opposite sides when their city was plunged into war.

They were teammates on the professional Yugoslav shooting team, with Olympic aspirations.

But when Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic declares the creation of a new Serbian Republic of Bosnia, the friendship turns deadly.

Knowing that worse is yet to come, Serbian Slavko, having been drafted by Karadzik's army, tells Croat Vlado to leave the city with his Muslim wife and daughter.

Vlado does not want to leave his home and business, and pledges to stay despite a massive outflow of people from the city.

"Refugees, no, that's third world stuff ... We're Europeans," he proclaims.

But pride costs Vlado more than his home and business. It almost costs him the lives of his entire family.

In one of the most emotional scenes in war-movie history, a blast in a quiet night shatters Vlado's bedroom window.

The intensity is felt not only as the young couple run naked to save their daughter and narrowly escape the shelling, but when they find themselves outside surrounded by people also driven out of bombarded homes, all with the same stomach-turning realization that they have been thrown into misery they have yet to comprehend.

The film then takes the audience through the overnight transformation of a once typical cosmopolitan European city into that of a killing zone.

The concerned Vlado joins the city's unkempt army led by a local black marketeer.

He refuses to leave the city even when Slavko, who is now training Serbian sharpshooters, offers one last chance to escape the city. Vlado's wife and daughter choose to stay with him.

In war, people learn to survive.

The moving birthday dinner scene of Vlado's 12-year-old Nadja (Karianne Henderson), a modest celebration with a few sausages, two small pizzas and two bottles of beer ("Where did you get all these?"), is in stark contrast to the weekend party -- where lambs were barbecued and the brew never stopped flowing -- in the beginning of the film.

But life continues to get harder for those opting to stay in Sarajevo.

Snipers in high buildings in the city increasingly and indiscriminately aim at innocent civilians, including women and children. Getting bread and water becomes a deadly race between flying bullets.

When one of these bullets hits his friend's daughter Lejla, the two grief-stricken families grow apart.

The father, Misho (Adam Kotz), is inconsolable because Vlado did not use the chance he had to rescue their families. Vlado's embittered wife and daughter leave him for a safer part of the city.

Vlado searches for the sniper and shoots the killer. From that point, he officially becomes a "sniper hunter".

"We're looking for anything, any changing lights, shadows, cigarette smoke, anything," he tells his rag-tag army.

Soon enough it is the smoke coming out of the mouth of his own friend Slavko that he will have to face.

The script is helped with a cast of fairly low profile but competent actors who not only can deliver their lines convincingly but also draw out three-dimensional characterization.

Linus Roache (The Wings of the Dove) possesses the wonderful capability of inner acting -- the minimalist approach of acting out gray area emotions where the most subtle movement in facial muscles depicts much intensity -- equal to that of William Hurt and Anthony Hopkins.

Vincent Perez's (The Crow 2, City of Angels) portrayal of the born-again Serb who lives out the primal war instinct with dilating pupils and uncanny nonchalance is disturbing.

"I've got my own happiness here," he tells Vlado at their last meeting, when the latter comes to visit him. By now, Slavko lives with his girlfriend at a new home up on the hill which was brutally taken from a family.

The success of director David Attwood in reliving the war and engaging the audience, most of whom may never comprehend the war, lies in screenwriter Guy Hibert's carefully threaded scenes and selective pacing.

Set in Budapest and Sarajevo, the film has a chilling documentary-like atmosphere.

But audiences won't find the gruesome shock of the infamous opening scene of the Omaha Beach D-Day attacks in Saving Private Ryan here, nor will they be dragged by the overly poetic pace of Thin Red Line.

Shot Through the Heart is definitely a 1990s war movie. It does not glorify, it refuses to succumb to romanticism, though it keeps producing poignant and quietly disturbing scenes.

To people afflicted by war, there is likely no heroic bravery, only the biting realism that they must survive.