'Welcome to Sarajevo' is good reporting
By Rayya Makarim
JAKARTA (JP): Welcome to Sarajevo plunges the audience into a world of war correspondents who for several months have been covering the UN's 14th most dangerous place on earth, which is well on its way to topping the list.
Initially, the central character Michael Henderson (Stephen Dillane) treats the war as part of his daily reporting until he finds himself at the Ljubica Ivezic Orphanage. Here he sees the number of children swell as prewar orphans are joined by those who have lost their families in the fighting.
Henderson sheds all objectivity and embarks on a crusade to inform the world's TV viewers of the plight of these children. Eventually, Henderson takes matters into his own hands and, with the help of Nina (Marisa Tomei), smuggles a child out of Bosnia.
Michael Winterbottom's Welcome to Sarajevo -- which is loosely based on British journalist Michael Nicholson's book Natasha's Story -- is as hesitant as its leading character reporting from the front lines of a city under siege.
Henderson finds himself torn between his responsibility as a hard-core journalist and his duty as an emotionally involved human being.
Henderson opts for the latter. The film, however, makes the choice with less resolve.
Shot in cinema vrit -- or "cinema truth" -- where the camera follows the action on screen, Winterbottom, who also directed Jude starring Kate Winslet, seems content to provide a documentary-style history of the situation in the former Yugoslavia.
The film uses actual news footage selected from reels of Bosnian TV and ITN coverage, often confusing whether it wants to tell a story or report an event.
To be true, the film has a number of potentially great stories.
The problem, however, is its failure to follow up on any of them. One can easily imagine a wonderful story about Henderson and Emira (Emira Nusevic), the child he adopts, or a love story between Risto (Goran Visnjic), the Sarajevan driver, and Jane (Kerry Fox), the British TV producer.
One can also imagine a film about war correspondents trapped between bullets and an indifferent world.
The writer, Frank Cottrell Boyce, however, has other plans. It is clear that he wanted to make the film not just the story of one man but a collection of true accounts, with Sarajevo as the main character.
Winterbottom, who also relies on Sarajevo to tell his story, uses visual irony. The opening scene shows a wedding procession that is savagely interrupted by a panic rush as we see the bride's mother fall to the ground in a pool of blood. Later we see a close-up of the Holiday Inn Hotel that zooms-out to reveal a soldier guarding a war tank.
More ironies are cleverly woven into the music soundtrack and political speeches. For example, the arrival of UN negotiators is accompanied by Bobby Moferrin's Don't Worry Be Happy playing in the background. Another scene shows a sequence of civilian killings followed by a statement from the Pentagon: "We do not see any evidence of a program of systematic or mass killing of innocent people".
While the Serbs bombard civilians with heavy artillery, the filmmaker bombards the audience with newsreels, archival footage, and political speeches. Although the images are forceful and convincing, they become the focus of the story rather than the background.
As a result, characters such as flashy American journalist Flynn (Woody Harrelson) and freelance reporter Annie Mcgee (Emily Lloyd) serve more as a Hollywood selling pitch instead of a necessary vehicle to further the plot. They are simply superimposed onto the flickering images for commercial purposes.
Made shortly after the Bosnian war ended, Welcome to Sarajevo concentrates most effectively on the feel of life in a besieged city. Winterbottom succeeds in repeating the general atmosphere of the capital city, complete with sniper attacks and food lines.
Nevertheless, the poor characterization and loose plot turns it into more of a successful documentary than a sensible feature.
The director's choice to use "live" footage was to remind the audience that they had seen the images before.
"It would emphasize how anesthetized people have become to what they see on the news," he said. With that in mind, the plot and characters became secondary, a forced cinematic choice, leaving the audience shocked but not necessarily affected.
Welcome to Sarajevo reminds us of watching the news. It keeps us more informed and less involved.