Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams

Director: Jasmila Žbanić

Cast: Mirjana Karanovic, Luna Mijovic, Leon Lucev, Kenan Catic

(Strand Releasing, 2006) Rated: N/A

US theatrical release date: 16 February 2007

UK theatrical release date: 15 December 2006

By Jesse Hicks

Generations

cover art

 Trailer

 Official Site

Only fools have children at this time and day.
—Saran (Bogdan Diklic)

In his New York Review of Books essay, “September 11 at the Movies,” Daniel Mendelsohn questions a current trend—both critical and aesthetic—in privileging “authenticity” as a component of art. Such thinking, he writes, defines fidelity to “reality” as a moral virtue, a refusal of “exploitation.” The resulting “flatly passive, affectless” recreations draw emotional responses not “from the way in which the action has been treated by the writer and the director, but rather from the prior historical knowledge you already bring to the occasion—it’s only awful to watch because you know something like it happened to real people.” Such films may bear witness to versions of history, but they do little to illuminate it. Refusal to probe, to question and interpret—in short, to attempt the process of art—renders them mute.

Jasmila Žbanic’s Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams similarly fails to offer its own artistic “reality.” On the official webpage, the director says her film is “about TRUTH, a cosmic power necessary to progress, and very much needed by society in Bosnia and Herzegovina who must strive to reach maturity.” Such dogmatic pronouncements usually signal pedantic intent, and Zbanic teaches so intently that she forgets to make her “truth” matter to her characters, or to the audience.

The film follows Esma (Mirjana Karanovic), struggling to raise her daughter, Sara (Luna Mijovic), in the aftermath of the Balkan War. They live in Grbavica, a neighborhood of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo. The film opens on a counseling group comprised of two dozen women, all of whom receive public assistance; we learn later that in Sara’s school, to have a martyred father (a “shaheed”) is a mark of belonging, more common than not, and that rival crime lords are jockeying for control of the neighborhood’s meager businesses.

Sara believes her father was killed in the war, yet when she asks her mother for the certificate proving his martyrdom, Esma becomes sullen and withdrawn. An early scene demonstrates Esma’s ambivalence toward her daughter and foreshadows what’s to come: after waking her mother, Sara engages in a typical bout of mother-daughter horseplay. The game ends, though, with Sara pinning her mother to the floor, and Esma reacting violently. When at last she abruptly tells Sara to get ready for school, her back is turned to the camera, now as closed off from the audience as from her daughter.

In her pursuit of “history,” Sara repeatedly functions as a surrogate for viewers who don’t bring their own knowledgeable backgrounds to the film. She, like most Western viewers, has little concept of the horrors of the Balkan War; she knows only its grim aftermath. She reads the war through her mother, who remains inscrutably distant, or through the second-generation tales she hears at school. Again, this serves Žbanic’s ideology better than her drama, the point being that the film is about, in her words, “VICTIMS who, though they did not commit any crime, they are still not entirely innocent in relation to future generations.”

This could be a powerful, complex idea. But in Grbavica, theme supersedes character and history trumps art. Sara and Esma thrust and parry with one another, but they’re just biding time until the film’s climax, which foregrounds a historical point about the Balkans War, that 20,000 Bosnian women were systematically raped by Serb soldiers. But in the context of the film, this “revelation” has little dramatic weight. History, in the final accounting, is not enough.

— 2 March 2007
Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams - Trailer
 
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One main difference between art and science is that art cannot be learned. Science can. If you are not born with the ability to feel some form of art, you cannot learn to appreciate it. That is my opinion. What you can learn is to explain art. Many times I felt something about a piece of art, something that made it great, but I couldn’t describe what it was. As I was getting older and accumulating life experience, I came to understand a lot of those pieces of art, i.e. I understood what it was that I felt about them. I did not gain anything new except the ability to explain the greatness of a particular piece of art to myself and maybe to some other people, but tha artistic value I had absorbed the first time around. If you didn’t feel it the first time you saw it, you never will.

The way we percieve art also depends a lot on where and how we grew up and how the society shaped us as individuals. Art depends on how an individual experiences the world, because art expresses itself through individual experiences. If one cannot understand how an artist or a character in a piece of art experiences the world, it is very hard to experience that art.

I feel that Mr. Hicks is just not capable to fully understand this movie. First of all, he takes to scientific an approach. He mentions current trends. he tells us the drama was missing. He would probably want to see many unexpected turns like in Hollywood pulp fiction. Basically, he is too superficial. Content didn’t break through to him, just the form.

“Such films may bear witness to versions of history, but they do little to illuminate it. Refusal to probe, to question and interpret—in short, to attempt the process of art—renders them mute.”

Mr. Hicks has completely missed the point. Žbanić‘s goal was not to expose history. The history is more than well known to her intended audience. What she wants to expose is the presence, the lives of some individuals, who happen to be very typical (that is why they need to be exposed). We are concentrated on our daily problems, we don’t have time to imagine what others’ lives might be like. Or we don’t care. Maybe we would care if we were aware of lives of certain people. Now, did you, Mr. Hicks, try to imagine what it is like to live Esma’s life? You did not. Try. Try to imagine what your sister’s or your daughter’s life would be like in Esma’s or Sara’s shoes. You see this as some imaginary story, so unreal and far away from your reality. Put some woman you love in Esma’s or Sara’s role and try to imagine it. The goal was to make people try to imagine how the lives of compeltely innocent people were affected by the war. Numbers, facts, and summaries are just not real enough. What do you think you would do if you were Esma? Tell me. Email me. I would really like to know. Žbanić has succedeed more than I would ever expect. She has made Esma and Sara so real that I feel I know them personally. She made me aware of the reality of the problem. She made me think and feel. Mr. Hicks does not have the ability to experience this piece of art. All he has seen is some history, where there was none.

“This could be a powerful, complex idea. But in Grbavica, theme supersedes character and history trumps art. Sara and Esma thrust and parry with one another, but they’re just biding time until the film’s climax, which foregrounds a historical point about the Balkans War, that 20,000 Bosnian women were systematically raped by Serb soldiers. But in the context of the film, this “revelation” has little dramatic weight. History, in the final accounting, is not enough.”

And he has seen a lack of drama. Sara and Esma are just biding time because that is what their lives are like. Their lives, just like the lives of many others, are just time biding. Too boring for Mr. Hicks. He would like to see some car chases. I am really pissed off at Hollywood for making a whole generation incapable of appreciating the film art. And, again, he mentions history, where there is none. By his standards, one could only make science fiction movies, because placing a movie into some real place and time is just history. The point is that their lives are boring. Not just boring, but humiliating too. It doesn’t move you. You are incapable of insight into human soul. I am wondering how many pages of Zola you could read. One other point that illustrates this, is not seeing Esma’s love for Sara.

“An early scene demonstrates Esma’s ambivalence toward her daughter and foreshadows what’s to come: after waking her mother, Sara engages in a typical bout of mother-daughter horseplay. The game ends, though, with Sara pinning her mother to the floor, and Esma reacting violently. When at last she abruptly tells Sara to get ready for school, her back is turned to the camera, now as closed off from the audience as from her daughter.”

Esma’s play with her daughter, which she suddenly ends, illustrates the duality of her feelings. She loves Sara, but hates what happened to her. Whenever it crosses her mind, she cannot laugh or play. Not just that she hates what happened to herself, but what happened to Sara, that she was brought into this world with a burden that she didn’t deserve and is not her fault. If Sara’s friends at school new the truth about Sara, they would be much less friendly towards her. Whoever finds it out, will look at Sara differently. Esma knows that. In some sense she feels guilty as if she did that to her daughter. That is why she tries to hide the truth as hard as she can. She is trying to protect Sara from the society in which it is an honor to be a daughter of a man who died as a soldier, but a horrible shame to be a daughter as a Serb rapist. That is why Esma begs for money and humiliates herself. She loves her daughter.

There is actually so much drama in the movie, if you are capable of understanding it. Mr. Hicks just can’t understand nor feel it. Either because he just doesn’t know how these people experience the world or he is not capable of understanding art in general.

Comment by Fikret Skrgic from Chicago — March 4, 2007 @ 11:38 pm

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