"Nice Villages Burn Nicely"

Movie director Srdjan Dragojevic could hardly wait for a chance at making a second movie after the success of his debut "We're Not Angels".

Most importantly, this is the first FRY film with a story from the war in former Yugoslavia (i.e. Bosnia). Although it generally picks up places Kusturica covered in "Underground", Dragojevic's advantage in showing images of the tragedy includes several convincing episodes based on real life war time events. Dragojevic begins his movie paraphrasing the start of Kusturica's "When Father Was Away on Business" but the blood isn't only on kid's clothes but also on managers and workers who are caught up in the "brotherhood and unity" socialist game which is about to burst. That's where he introduces the heroes of the film, a Moslem and a Serb.

In a slightly lengthy introduction we are shown images of the Bosnian idyll near the mythical Drina border, demonstrating hindsight and the causes of the war - the tensions that couldn't be called by their real name 10 years ago. The slow portrait of pre-war days is broken by a collage of images that raise the tension and invoke the audience to recognize themselves in events on the screen.

The best part of the movie is the tunnel which was the nucleus of the story based on a war report by Vanja Bulic. An anecdote says Bulic's editor reacted immediately with a remark that the Americans would immediately make a movie from the story. The Americans in this case are actors Dragan Bjelogrlic and Nikola Kojo who realized it was easier to produce the film themselves than go chasing after producers. The film has technically high standards because of that.

So in the tunnel we find surrounded by "Bosnian Moslem forces", which the heroes call Turks, a local Serb (Dragan Bjelogrlic), a smuggler with no ideology (Nikola Kojo), a stereotypical Belgrade junkie (Zoran Cvijanovic), two Chetniks (Milorad Mandic and Dragan Petrovic), a former JNA sergeant (Bata Zivojinovic), a Banja Luka professor (Dragan Maksimovic) and an American reporter out for glory (Lisa Moncure).

In addition to that group portrait we get war profiteers, disinterested doctors and nurses, arrogant members of the authority, confused opposition members, refugees...

Dragojevic didn't try to declare himself as something but gave the characters a comic angle in the bloody tragedy. That failure to allocate guilt apart from the powers of the new world order who caused the unjustified sanctions is more a call for a collective analysis and cleansing than a direct failure to call events by their real names. In that sense "Nice Villages Burn Nicely" is a moving experience; the images of burning villages filmed on location in Bosnia carry a high tragedy level - that war is a tragic thing, the heroes discover, which awakes the worst in people or sometimes the best.

Although the authors said they were inspired by movies like "M.A.S.H." and "Apocalypse Now", "Nice Villages Burn Nicely" is an original movie and an attempt to move from the underground into a tunnel whose end is in sight. It would be a good thing if this movie wasn't the start of a new trend of war films, but Kusturica has announced a new film.