Grbavica Jasmila Zbanic Austria/Bosnia/Herzegovina 2006
What sets Grbavica apart from the horde of other worthy foreign films is the cruel emotional fallout the film suffocates within. Set in post-war Sarajevo, the bloody disintegration of the former Yugoslavian states overshadows the characters in this film like brooding storm clouds they can never outrun. The focus of Grbavica is the relationship between the survivors of the war and the new post-war generation but the past cannot so easily be left behind.
Esma (Mirjana Karanovic) is a single mother who is trying to raise money for her young teen daughter Sara’s school trip. In addition to her day job at a factory she gets a job waitressing at a nightclub where she befriends one of the bouncers. Meanwhile at Sara’s school the teachers offer to take pupils on the trip for free if they can prove they are the children of war heroes by bringing in a certificate. When Sara hassles Esma for the certificate she keeps avoiding the issue.
As the gruelling plot unravels (a slow unearthing of who exactly Sara’s father is) audiences are left to cope with the shattered lives of the generation who survived. Esma trained as a doctor. Her almost boyfriend trained as an economist. Both now work as a waitress and a bouncer for a profiteer who made money selling coffee at inflated prices during the conflict.
Whilst undergoing the social niceties of small talk as their relationship develops, they don’t discuss anything banal like the latest pop song or a book. No, they reminisce how they may have met identifying a body unearthed from a mass grave. This is exactly the kind of slow wounded character interaction that director Jasmila Zbanic builds upon in Grbavica. There is so much emotional baggage in the film that the atmosphere might be lightened if it were set at the bottom of the ocean.
Similar to Lilya-4-Ever Sara plays in the rubble of the former society. Where in Lukas Lukas Moodysson’s film Volodja and Lilya play in an abandoned tank factory, here Sara skips school with her friend Samir and hangs out in a shelled-out apartment block. Most of the rest of the film’s imagery is similarly dowdy. The opening and closing image of Grbavica is of a room full of women seemingly asleep. Scanning slowly through the ranks of these people the camera gradually reaches Esma, the focus of the film. The tragedy is though, that this film could be about any of the women in that room. As is later revealed these are women at a counselling centre. Some attend because they are generally traumatised and act accordingly disturbed. Others like Esma and her friends go solely for the money but as Grbavica reveals, the scars of the war run deep. Jasmila Zbainc shows with a pained clarity that however touching and sad this particular tale is, it is just of many.
