Angelina Jolie's 'Blood and Honey' paints a searing picture of war's horror

Give Angelina Jolie credit for not taking an easy road in her first narrative film as a director. "In the Land of Blood and Honey," which she also scripted, is a brutal and not at all simple story of lives swept aside by the horrors of the war in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The filmmaker does not hold back on depicting those horrors.

A brief, sweet prologue introduces us to two people who come together for a dance, on the eve of the war's outbreak. The evening ends with the bombing of the club they dance in, and everything that follows is streaked with the blood of war.

The two people are Ajla (Zana Marjanovic), a Bosnian Muslim helping her sister with a new baby, and Danijel (Goran Kostic), a soldier in the Serbian army. A few months later, they are on opposite sides, as she is rounded up and imprisoned with other Bosnian women in the military camp he presides over.

Danijel still has feelings for Ajla, and he protects her from the violence, including systematic rape, that the other women are subjected to. At some point she becomes almost a personal prisoner of his, kept in a private room on the grounds.

I think it's wrong to describe what goes on between the two of them as a "love story," as some commentators have casually done. Jolie is attempting to explore a huge range of ideas here, from the choices left to people who have no power (we can make up our own minds about whether Ajla cares for Danijel, or whether her survival instincts have taken over) to the toll that war takes on the bodies of women.

There are sequences that attempt to give perspective to the tangled conflict in the former Yugoslavia, but these tend to be the weakest in the film (although Rade Serbedzija, as Danijel's military father, is casually terrifying in describing the depths of Serbian rage). A two-hour movie can't possibly give every perspective anyway.

What Jolie focuses on with greater success is the ground-level experience of people who are warped by the effects of war. Thanks to! the stu nning performance by Zana Marjanovic and a strong one by Goran Kostic, that two-person story does come to life, and not entirely in predictable ways.

The film has its weak passages and even some incoherence. But it connects at the strangest moments: soldiers visiting a looted art museum, for instance, and seeing all the enlightened creations of European culture, including an exhibit on the Olympic Games held in Sarajevo in 1984, less than a decade before the monstrous events we're watching.

Those kinds of juxtapositions -- including the film's very title -- provide powerful jolts to any vanity we might have about how civilized we are.

"In the Land of Blood and Honey" (3 stars)

A brutal story set during the war in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, with particular focus on the tortured relationship between a Bosnian woman and her Serbian captor. Writer-director Angelina Jolie does not hold back on the horrors, but she's best at the ground-level view of how war has completely warped the lives of these two particular people. In Serbian and Bosnian, with English subtitles.

Rating: R, for nudity, violence, subject matter.

Showing: Varsity.