Can you make a humorous and Beckettian film about war? Danis Tanovic -Bosnian director of the Oscar-winning No Man's Land - has, writes Ian Kilroy
How can you be humorous about a war that brought to the world the term "ethnic cleansing"? A war that in our own time - and in full-colour - brought to our television screens the shocking images of mutilated bodies of fellow Europeans dumped in mass graves, the football grounds turned into graveyards and the victims of Serb snipers? In Danis Tanovic's film No Man's Land, a soldier on the frontline of the Bosnian War can read of events in Rwanda in disbelief, unable to comprehend man's inhumanity to man. The effect is inanely comic; a bit like that Jewish sense of humour that sends itself up, à la Woody Allen, or those stand-up comics at the height of the Troubles that poked fun at the appalling predicament of their own society, employing a humour that somehow relieved the pressure of the mess all around.
What Tanovic has achieved in No Man's Land could only have been achieved by a Bosnian. He has taken an imagined episode of the Bosnian War and transformed it into a talisman that shows up the absurdity of all violent conflict and universalises the situation of two soldiers on opposite sides.
"I don't think that No Man's Land is a comedy," says Tanovic, in his heavy Balkan accent, down the phone from his adopted city of Paris. "I think that it's a serious film with a good sense of humour." It may have been that combination of humour and utter seriousness that allowed No Man's Land - the first feature film of this Sarajevo-born writer-director - to beat Amelié, the hot favourite for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film at this year's Academy Awards. But then Tanovic's film has a track record of achievement - taking the award for the same category at the 2002 Golden Globe, as well as the prize for Best Screenplay at Cannes last year. It is a succession of achievements that surprises Tanovic, he says.
"It's just because Amelié had a big success in Europe and in America that everybody thought that it would win," he says. "Was I surprised? Yes. You're always surprised. How can you expect to win these prizes all around the world? But when I made the film I was aware that I'd made a good movie. But with prizes - frankly, it's ridiculous to compare movies. How can you compare my movie to Amelié? Being nominated for an Oscar was a great thing."
Tanovic's movie, which fairly and humanely tells the story of a Bosnian and Serbian soldier (Ciki and Nino) stranded together between enemy lines - like some kind of Balkan Vladimir and Estragon, but full of mutual hate and distrust - is very much informed by Tanovic's own life. During the conflict in Bosnia, he was responsible for the Bosnian army's film archive, often shooting footage on the front-line in Sarajevo. He has also made a number of documentaries depicting the lives of people marked by the war, or people who fought in it.
"I saw the best and I saw the worst," he says of his wartime experiences. "If something was happening they [the Bosnian army] would call and I would go there. I saw a lot of things."
Tanovic's tone when he speaks conveys the memory of things unspeakable. But did the camera create a distance, easing the burden of witness? "Yes. Definitely. It helps somehow in a strange way. You feel almost invulnerable when you're working, which is ridiculous. You're not thinking about danger in that particular moment." His frontline experiences with the Bosnian army can only have strengthened his sense of the injustices suffered by the Bosnian people. Indeed, the tone of No Man's Land is fervently pro-Bosnian in its politics. But then, Tanovic says he does not believe in the possibility of objectivity.
"I think that objectivity is nonsense," he says. "I don't think it exists. I was not objective. If I was anything, I would say I was humanist. Frankly, I didn't try to make a movie about faults and guilt. I think that by now everybody should understand what happened in Bosnia and who were the good guys and who were the bad guys - and if they don't that's their problem. It's not up to me to educate the world. I am pro-Bosnian anyway. I can't escape from that scheme. I am Bosnian. But I guess in this conflict, any normal human being would be pro-Bosnian." Tanovic says his film - particularly in the short documentary-like section within the film - simply depicts the facts: "And knowing the facts you become pro-Bosnian," he says. War correspondent Martin Bell echoes this sentiment when he writes of the Bosnian war that commentary was redundant, that "the plain facts said it all", and that they largely damn the Serbs.
Unsurprisingly, the reception to the film in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Tanovic's small country of four million people, was rapturous. Even before his hero's welcome after the Oscar, No Man's Land went down well with the Sarajevo public.
"It was great," he says. "I was a little bit scared, I didn't know how they'd react to the movie, if they'd like it or not. But everything went well. We won the audience award and a critic's award at the Sarajevo film festival, which we opened." His affection for the Bosnian landscape is also evident in the film - which was, in fact, shot in Slovenia. Tanovic conjures up the Mediterranean heat of a long Balkan summer's day; the single day that the film's action takes place. He agrees that the beauty of the natural world, and its opposition to the horrors of the wars that mankind wage, forms a counterpoint in the film.
'The nature in the movie is striking," he says. "The joyful colours that you see all around. That is something that we really paid attention to, because we didn't want to make a grey, dark movie, as you would expect. That's the aesthetic of the film.
"You also see that the film itself was made almost as a drama. In that sense, we reduced the scenes of fighting and we paid more attention to the state of mind of the characters." That drama is one reminiscent of Beckett. It is a comparison that Tanovic takes as a compliment. "He made a theatre of the absurd and I made a film of the absurd," he says. "But when I wrote it, I didn't think of Samuel," he says.
And Tanovic, like Beckett, has chosen to live in France. One reason he cites for choosing Paris over his homeland is that film directors "don't have to fight for the final cut in this country". Indeed, his next project, like No Man's Land, is primarily a French-funded affair. Although details will not be announced until Monday, at a press conference in Cannes, Tanovic is happy to give a hint: "I can tell you only that it's about the 11th of September. Eleven film directors from around the world doing a movie about the 11th of September - and we're all making 11 minutes, nine seconds in one take."
While it will be some time before Irish audiences view the new project, Tanovic hopes audiences in Ireland will take to his first major project, No Man's Land: "Unfortunately, I think that Irish audiences will understand it more than any other nation here in Europe". He could be right - if the absurdity of our own history is anything to go by.
No Man's Land is at selected cinemas