Pretty Village, Pretty Flame | |
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Directed by | Srđan Dragojević |
Produced by | Dragan Bjelogrlić Goran Bjelogrlić Milko Josifov Nikola Kojo |
Written by | Vanja Bulić Srđan Dragojević Biljana Maksić Nikola Pejaković |
Starring | Dragan Bjelogrlić Nikola Kojo Milorad Mandić Dragan Maksimović |
Music by | Aleksandar Habić Laza Ristovski |
Cinematography | Dušan Joksimović |
Editing by | Petar Marković |
Studio | RTS Ministry of Culture Cobra Films |
Release date(s) | May 1996 |
Running time | 115 minutes |
Country | FR Yugoslavia |
Language | Serbian |
Pretty Village, Pretty Flame (Serbian Cyrillic alphabet: Лепа села лепо горе, literally translated as "Beautiful villages burn beautifully") is a 1996 Yugoslavian film directed by Srđan Dragojević that gave uniquely bleak yet darkly humorous account of the Bosnian War.
It is considered a modern classic of Serbian cinema. Almost 800,000 people went to see the movie in cinemas across Serbia.[1] This equates to approximately 8% of the total country's population at the time of the film's release.
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The plot, inspired by real life events that took place in the opening stages of the Bosnian War, tells a story about small group of Serbian soldiers trapped in a tunnel by a Muslim force. The film's screenplay is based on an article written by Vanja Bulić for Duga magazine about the actual event. Through flashbacks that describe the pre-war lives of each trapped soldier, the film describes life in former Yugoslavia and tries to give a view as to why former neighbours and friends turned on each other.
Following the success of the movie, Bulić wrote a novel named Tunel that's essentially an expanded version of his magazine article.
The movie's main protagonist is Milan (Dragan Bjelogrlić), a Bosnian Serb. At the beginning of the war in Bosnia, his life in his little village with his best friend Halil (Nikola Pejaković), a Muslim, is generally quiet and reminiscent of that of a normal lifestyle in the countryside. He gradually notices that Bosniaks whom he knew in his village are slowly but surely moving out.
During the conflict, Milan joins the Bosnian Serb Army and is attached to a squad that includes:
Milan is generally dissatisfied with the way the war is being conducted and is disturbed by the fact that profiteers are looting and burning his best friend Halil's property. Milan shoots three of the profiteers, wounding them and is shocked that the nearby kafana owner Slobo (at whose kafana he used to drink with Halil) is with them. Milan is later told by the kafana owner that his mother has been killed by Bosniaks from Halil's squad.
As the movie progresses, Milan and his squad are ambushed and encircled by a group of Bosniak fighters. Seeing that there is no way around the issue, Milan decides to tell his surviving squad mates about a tunnel he was scared of entering as a child. The squad enters the tunnel and engages in a firefights with the Bosniak fighters. They are joined by Brzi and Liza.
The squad stays inside the cave for a week and slowly but surely the soldiers snap, one by one they try to leave the tunnel and they are killed or wounded for it. Meanwhile, each of them have flashbacks as to what brought each of them into this situation. After their force has been whittled down substantially, Gvozden drives the truck out of the tunnel; the truck explodes killing both Gvozden and the Muslim fighters, and opening the way out.
The movie's climax is when Milan and Halil meet outside at the tunnel's exit and openly ask each other a few important questions. Halil asks who burned down his shop while Milan asks who killed his mother; both men deny each of the actions. Halil is then killed by a Serbian artillery strike.
Milan, Petar and Brzi escape and all three are sent to the Belgrade Military Hospital, where Brzi dies.
Although the film has highly non-linear structure, most consider it easy to follow. The story is told in several time periods, which cut back and forth:
In addition, there is a prologue and epilogue:
Finally, there is a scene outside the main narrative of the film in which the young Milan and Halil enter the tunnel to find out it is full of dead bodies. Two of those bodies are themselves (from 1980s/1990s), symbolizing their fates sealed in this tunnel.
The film was shot from spring 1995 until early 1996 on a US$2 million budget.[2] The money raised for the film was done through a legal entity Cobra Film Department that was registered as a limited liability company by Nikola Kojo, Dragan Bjelogrlić, Goran Bjelogrlić, and Milko Josifov.[3] Most of the money came from the Serbian government's (under prime minister Mirko Marjanović) Ministry of Culture (headed by cabinet minister Nada Perišić-Popović) as well as from the Serbian state television RTS.
Most of the film was shot on location in Višegrad, Republika Srpska (Serb inhabited entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina, at the time still governed by Radovan Karadžić), often in places that were former battlefields.
According to Dragojević, the movie's title is paraphrased from a passage describing burning villages in the distance in Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1932 novel Voyage au bout de la nuit, literary work that had a strong effect on Dragojević when he read it in his early youth.[4]
The film won accolades for direction, acting and brutally realistic portrayal of the war in former Yugoslavia. It was also the first Serbian film to show the Serbian side of the conflict involved in atrocities and ethnic cleansing - the title of the film is an ironic comment on the protagonists' activities in a Bosnian village.
However, the film also caused controversy, mostly among Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) and to a lesser extent among some Croats, who complained about its alleged pro-Serb bias and unequal treatment of warring sides, citing differing depictions of atrocities. According to this view, Bosnian Serb atrocities are shown with ironic flair, while Bosniak atrocities are shown with utter solemnity. Conversely, the film is considered controversial by some Bosnian Serbs for its supposedly anti-Serb bias.
The film was also controversial on the European film festival circuit. The Venice Film Festival refused the film with its director Gillo Pontecorvo calling it "fascist cinema".[5]
Writing in Sight & Sound in November 1996, British author Misha Glenny delivered a stinging attack on critics who view Pretty Village, Pretty Flame or Emir Kusturica's Underground through a simplistic, reductionist pro- or anti-Serb critical lens.[6]
In addition to FR Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro), the only other former Yugoslav countries where the movie had an official theatrical distribution were Slovenia and FYR Macedonia. Released in Slovenia as Lepe vasi lepo gorijo, it became a cinema hit in the country with 72,000 admission tickets sold.[7] In FYR Macedonia it also posted a good box office result with more than 50,000 admission tickets sold.[8]
The reaction to the film in North America was very positive. It got plenty of press coverage following its debut showings at festivals in Montreal and Toronto.
Variety's Emanuel Levy penned a glowing review calling the film "wilder in its black humor than MASH, bolder in its vision of politics and the military than any movie Stanley Kubrick has made, and one of the most audacious antiwar statements ever committed to the bigscreen".[9]
Ken Fox of the TV Guide praised Dragojević for "ultimately refusing to deal in heroes and villains and never shying away from self-condemnation" while concluding that Pretty Village, Pretty Flame is "a bloody, uncompromising and surprisingly enthralling piece of antiwar filmmaking that pulls no punches and demands to be seen".[10]
Even before wider distribution, the film received notices in major American newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and the Toledo Blade that covered it from the Bosnian War angle.[11][12]
In his very favourable 1997 review, American online film critic James Berardinelli labelled the film "a powerful condemnation of war that shares several qualities with the German films Das Boot and Stalingrad".[13]
New York Times' Lawrence Van Gelder gave kudos to Dragojević for "unleashing a powerful assault on the insanity of the war that pitted Serb against Muslim in Bosnia" and praised the film as "a clear, well-meaning, universal appeal to reason".[14]
Shlomo Schwartzberg of Boxoffice magazine called some of the film's scenes "worthy of Vonnegut at his most hallucinatory", concluding overall that "the film is somewhat cliched and a little more pro-Serb than necessary, but packs a genuine punch".[15]
Gerald Peary wrote in April 1998 that Dragojević "creates a crass, unsentimental, muscular guys' world on the way to his vivid condemnation of the Bosnian War".[16]
The reaction to the film and its various aspects continues long after its theatrical and festival run ended. It is frequently used by various public figures as springboard for political, ethnic, and historical discussions and open issues that continue to plague the Balkans region.
In early 2000s, while promoting his movie No Man's Land, Muslim director and former soldier in the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war Danis Tanović called Pretty Village, Pretty Flame "well made, but ethically problematic due to its shameful portrayal of the war in Bosnia".[17]
Then during summer 2009, more than thirteen years after the film's release, outspoken Muslim actor, nationalist politician, and current Sarajevo Canton Minister of Culture Emir Hadžihafizbegović gave an interview at the 2009 Pula Film Festival in which he went after Dragojević and his crew by calling them "morbid and blasphemous" over the fact that some of the scenes in Pretty Village, Pretty Flame were shot on location in Višegrad, Republika Srpska while the war was still going on in some parts of Bosnia. Hadžihafizbegović further denounced Dragojević and the film's production crew by drawing a connection between them and local Višegrad paramilitary warlord Milan Lukić (not a member of the regular Army of Republika Srpska) who was later indicted and convicted by the Hague tribunal to life in prison for war crimes. The basis Hadžihafizbegović provided for such a strong accusation was the fact that in the film's closing credits, the filmmakers listed the Army of Republika Srpska among the institutions that helped the production: "As far as I'm concerned, by thanking the Republika Srpska Army in closing credits they're thanking Milan Lukić and his brethren".[18]
"Lepa sela lepo gore" garnered six wins and one nomination:
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