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| Courtesy of Cobra Films |
In a telling opening sequence that sets the tone for the piece, we’re presented with newsreel footage of a local Bosnian dignitary cutting the ribbon at a ceremony opening a newly constructed tunnel called the Tunnel of Brotherhood and Unity, a key factor in the enrichment of the area’s economy. As the ribbon is being cut, the dignitary inadvertently cuts into his fingers with the scissors, spilling blood on the ground compounded with screams of agony, forecasting the costly toll of human lives that will perish over this very tunnel. Jumping ahead ten years later, the same tunnel is neglected to the point of disintegration over time where we find childhood best friends Milan and Halil are playing near the tunnel but avoid going inside fearing a drekavac or ogre from Slavic mythology will incinerate their village in retaliation.
Jumping ahead another ten years on the eve of the Serbo-Croatian conflict, now-adult childhood besties Milan (Dragan Bjelogrlić) a Serbian man and Halil (Nikola Pejaković) a Muslim Bosniak are playing a game of basketball together remarking on their friendship being threatened by talk of war between the two ethnicities. From here the film starts jumping back and forth between the present inside a Military Medical Academy hospital in Belgrade where Milan recounts his wartime experiences from his bedside.
Cut to 1994 at the height of
the conflict, we see Milan is part of a special Army squad including criminals
and heroin addicts who are thrust into battle and find themselves covering
treaded ground, burning down the village they grew up in and burning down an
auto-shop Milan and Halil built together.
Over the course of the film, the squad accompanied by a stowaway female
American photojournalist covering the war finds itself barricaded inside the
Tunnel of Brotherhood and Unity with lifelong best friend Halil and his
opposing squad throwing all manner of firepower in the direction of the
cornered squad, pitting friend against friend.
An ensemble time-shifting wartime drama with an impishly sardonic sense of humor intended to make you snicker as well as really angry, the film is noted for its realism for shooting in the tunnel depicting a fierce protracted battle and for its depiction of a smorgasbord of characters thrown together into a simmering pressure cooker. The first film to show the war from the Serbian point of view, the film is handsomely composed in 1.85:1 widescreen by cinematographer Dušan Joksimović and the soundtrack by composers Laza Ristovski and Aleksandar Habić lends just the right amount of grunge sound to the proceedings to make the world lived in by these characters feel rough around the edges.
Arguably the film’s real star is the editor Petar Marković who finds a rhythm in the cross-cutting between timelines, often choosing key moments that land hard and heavy to cut away from for thoroughly galvanizing effect. Edited together without road markers, making us feel as lost and confused as the survivors of the battle inside the tunnel, the film has a dizzying narrative structure which can throw some off but those accustomed to the cross-cutting of Tarantino’s work will ease into this quickly. The ensemble cast of the piece comprised of Serbian actors all give dedicated, impassioned performances so they emerge as fully fledged characters though it mostly is concerned with the points of view of Milan and Halil, two lifelong soulmates who are now pointing guns at each other.
A staunchly anti-war epic which leaves you feeling both energized and enraged, the film was released to enormous commercial success in Serbia but was also met with a certain amount of controversy. After several film festivals rejected it including Venice Film Festival chairman and The Battle of Algiers director Gillo Pontecorvo dubbed it ‘fascist cinema’, critics for Sight & Sound began firing back calling the reactions to the film reductive. All the while, the film began enjoying North American distribution where the reception was enormously positive.
In the years since, the film still generates controversy such as when Bosniak director Danis Tanović blasted the film when he was promoting his wartime drama No Man’s Land. Whatever your position on the conflict is or was, Pretty Village, Pretty Flame to an outsider filmgoer peeking through the window packs a hefty hard sucker punch to the gut, leaving you shaken, agitated but somehow glad to have the knowledge now. Maybe the angriest anti-war epic of its kind since Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory.
--Andrew Kotwicki
