On a political level, "Welcome to Sarajevo" almost comes across as pro-Muslim propaganda, thus following the official line that tags the Serbs as the bad guys and the Muslims as the victims (and the Croats as a sinister footnote). People unfamiliar with the conflict will walk away with this general assumption--especially given the common knowlege that the Serbs participated very prominently in the three other Yugoslav wars. But the war was far more complex than that, and no single film has yet to show the startling array of dimensions that fueled the violence in Bosnia in the 90s; none manages to place the violence in a historical context. "Underground" came close, and the last sequence of "Ulysses' Gaze" gave it a good try, but it wasn't really there. (Crowd favorite "Pretty Village Pretty Flame" simply wasn't a good movie, whatever its intentions might have been.) Taken together, though, a picture of Bosnia begins to emerge--one that is decidedly dire and bloody, but one that at least suggests how complex the war was. Round it out with "Vukovar" and "Cabaret Balkan" and you'll have a home video film festival guaranteed to make you kill yourself. Until someone makes a film about pre-war Sarajevo, with its vibrant multi-ethnic communities, cosmopolitan sophistication, elegant boulevards, and generous hospitality (and am I the only one who remembers the Sarajevo Olympics?), cinematic Bosnia will have to be this violent wasteland of human pride and depravity.
On pure film-geek terms, "Welcome to Sarajevo" is a meandering story that doesn't really seem to know what it wants to be: is it a story about gonzo journalists, or about the rescue of a little girl, or about war atrocities? The gonzo journalist angle lasts for about a half hour, and then promptly goes away. Then there's the plot line about the rescue of the girl, which appears somewhat arbitrarily a little late in the game. Once that angle's resolved the movie keeps chugging along, with a thoroughly inconsequential return trip to Bosnia that serves little dramatic purpose except to kill off another character. The war atrocities thread runs throughout the film, but never gels into a story of its own. Given Woody Harrelson's top-billing and his grand entrance, you'd think he and his antics would be important...but they're not. Too many of the scenes go nowhere (did I have to see the bus pulling over so the kids could sleep? I think I could have figured out on my own that children sleep at night); scenes that seem important end up not being so, and some scenes that should be important are utterly forgettable. But still, the prolonged bus ride is dreadful to watch (in the good way--kids in danger, can't beat that for drama), and seeing the girl prancing about the English garden wearing a cute dress and a bow in her hair was enough to give me a sense of relief.
Final note: I can understand the outrage any Serb would feel watching this film. But in a way, maybe that's the point. Everyone should be outraged. Not by the one-sided depiction of the war, but by the fact that the Serbs did commit unspeakable atrocities in Bosnia and Croatia...as did the Croats and the Muslims (yes, even the "victims" took a generous shot at being the monsters). Emira could have been from any one of those groups, and children and adults from all sides of this spectacularly multi-sided war suffered the same as she did. The only other group that gets bad-mouthed in this film is the West. Of the many participants and guilty parties in Bosnia, it is important to realize that not all were Bosnian. European and American officials gave a collective shrug and said, "Not my problem," and all those history lessons were proven to be worthless as we let the Balkan powderkeg explode once again and turned our eyes away from another Holocaust.
