Witnesses (w/ English Subtitles)

Vinko Bresnan's 3rd film, "Witnesses," is an intense subtitled treat. The action proceeds by replaying scenes with increasingly more information from different points of view until the entire story is told. It's shot almost entirely in green and somber tones with the one splash of red coming at the end on the coat of the little girl. Mirjana Karanovic who has at least 13 films to her credit plays the mother who has just lost her husband in the conflict in Croatia. Ethnic hatred flares as her soldier son home on furlough with several buddies goes and kills a wealthy Serb who lives in their village, but there is a witness left behind who must eliminated to protect the crime. Kresimir Mikic plays the trigger man son. In war torn Croatia, the local police chief's wife lays in a coma, needing surgery to remove a piece of shrapnel lodged in her brain. An overwhelmed local hospital has little hope of a successful surgery. The uncle of the soldier offers to put the police chief's wife at the top of the surgical priority list if he will defer investigation of the murder to another time. Meanwhile, the mother's other son Kreso played by Leon Lucev comes home to continue his romantic affair with a newspaper reporter who is investigating the murder. The mother warns her other son to keep Kreso out of it. One of the conspirators gets so guilty over having to eliminate the young daughter of the slain Serb who was witness to the crime that he blows himself up with a hand grenade in a local tavern. This causes the other jumpy son to contact the more stable Kreso to help him. They take several guys out to a field and tie them to a tree. Mikic urinates on the captives and is waved off a nearby shrine which is feared to be booby-trapped. Bored & jumpy, Mikic picks up a rock and says that he bets he could hit the sheep from where he is. He pitches the rock and blows up the shrine that sends a grated fence flying that severs the leg of his older brother Kreso. Kreso hobbles on crutches and rescues the child and flees the border with his newspaper girlfriend that concludes the film on its one hopeful note as the three survivors look at a sunrise and a future together. The film is paced slowly and methodically. The action increases incrementally as we are allowed to see more and more of the puzzle of the story. The violence of the war erupts periodically and then the film quiets as the characters reflect on events. It is an excellent film, one that should have a wider audience in the United States. It is a film that makes you think about war, about violence, about ethnic hatred, and ultimately about hope. Enjoy!

Set in a town in Croatia, this melancholy film revisits the early 1990s during the Balkan conflict between Serbs and Croatians. With its nonlinear, sometimes dream-like structure it seems also to resurrect the war-torn psyche of those who lived through those times and became "witnesses" to its atrocities. Director Vinko Bresnan uses a super-wide screen and languid camera movements to follow his characters in and around a handful of buildings and streets as each is caught up in the aftermath of a shooting that takes the life of a man in the opening sequence of the film. Among them are a police detective and a newspaper reporter, who find their efforts frustrated by authorities as they attempt to discover the killers and save a witness from execution.

Filmed in muted colors under overcast skies, the story evokes the grim extremes of war-time anxiety, as soldiers return from the front either dead or maimed and those still fit to serve take up weapons to climb again into troop carriers, leaving behind those who wonder if they'll ever be seen alive again. Meanwhile, the plot unravels in fragments told out of sequence and repeated from different perspectives, so that a shroud of mystery keeps us guessing until the end how all its pieces fit together. The meaning, for instance, of a gunshot heard off-screen near the start of the film is not revealed until the final scene. Performances are compelling, and the musical score brooding. A well-made and moving film worth seeing.

A rather unusual approach to filming a drama. The sequences appear in a chronological order but presented from different angles of involvement in this murder/kidnapping case. The movie is slow and bizarre. I'm very familiar with the civil war in former Yugoslavia where all of this is happening, but even with understanding of the events that took place back then I still dislike the movie.

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