Luna Mijovic and Mirjana Karanovic
Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams
Written and directed by Jasmila Žbanić
Wars never really end for those who live through them or are born of them.
Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams, the superb and devastating feature debut of Jasmila Žbanić, ushers us into the at once hectic and depressive world of Esma (Mirjana Karanovic), a single mother, and her 12-year-old daughter, Sara (Luna Mijovic). Sara’s father, she’s been told, died a martyr, fighting the Serbs in Bosnia, but registration for a school trip raises doubts about that.
The suspense revolves less around who Sara’s father was—heavy and early foreshadowing on that point make it almost moot—then about whether and how her affectionate but tense relationship with her mom will survive the inevitable revelations.
Grbavica, the district in Sarajevo where they live, was used as an internment camp during the Yugoslav war. Though they scrape by, with Esma working two jobs, one as seamstress and one as bar waitress, their lives, beneath the busy day to day, are a ghost-filled cauldron of sadness and anxiety.Žbanić never resorts to anything as heavy-handed as flashbacks to convey Esma’s wartime traumas. But Karanovic’s panic at the aggressive sexual carousing in the bar, or even at being pinned by Sara during a roughhousing tickle session, speak volumes. And even that’s more information than we really need. Esma’s eyes, in a bittersweet gaze as she looks at her daughter, or, exhausted on a cross-town bus, staring through a rain-spotted window, tell tales the rest of her still finds too painful to relate.
The weird normalcy of ghastly postwar routines is palpable. The romantic bond Esma forges with a coworker at the bar begins with chitchat about identifying bodies dug up from the mass graves of the Chetniks’ victims. Her aunt complains of how shabby pensions are—not like before. The world is a palimpsest of before and after emotions and practicalities. Esma’s friend bemoans the fact that their high school reunion will have such a small turnout—given that most of the class has been killed or emigrated.
And the rupture between the before and after is embodied in Sara, a lovely, scary wild child. She’s girl enough to need her mother’s help to cut the nails of her right hand, but teen enough to get off on firing her boyfriend’s handgun. Flirty enough to chase after a heart trinket sliding across an ice rink, but mischievous enough to throw a sitter’s purse out the apartment window. You want to hold and comfort her even as, day by day, she becomes more tangibly the proverbial danger to herself and others.
In government-sponsored therapy and welfare sessions with other war-ravaged women, Esma recalls the beauty of baby Sara. When adolescent Sara shaves her unruly mop of hair, her bald scalp brings to mind images of World War II collaborators, of rock punks, but also of beautiful babies. She’s hideous and irresistible and fundamental. We can’t look at her. We can’t look away. And in that sense we are Esma.
Žbanić was a young art student during the war, and has made documentaries about children and adults traumatized by and wounded in it. The documentary punch of Grbavica is a great asset. No tricks. Not even any music beyond the folk songs characters sing (sometimes to their mutual irritation and amusement) or the astringent pumping of the dance music in the bar or on a car radio.
The drama is in Esma’s tensed shoulders, her beau’s chain smoking, the fear expressed in Sara’s fetal curl on a couch. Yes, events develop, involving not just family secrets but ex-soldier mobsters and the like. But the events that matter most were more than a decade ago. They reverberate through the slow pans over the women’s group, a mass of bodies, evocative itself of a mass grave, not unfittingly. They are perched between the living and the dead. And which side will claim Esma and Sara is a suspense tale that will quietly gnaw at you from the inside, no less so than if you were their family.-A.C.K.
