BosNet FILM REVIEW: "Shot Through the Heart"
va...@bosnet.org
Subject: BosNet FILM REVIEW: "Shot Through the Heart"
----------------------------------------------------------------------
B o s N e t - October 04, 1998
______________________________________________________________________
Available on Usenet as BIT.LISTSERV.BOSNET
______________________________________________________________________
For the list of commands
send a "help" message to: MAJO...@APPLICOM.COM
To unsubscribe send: UNSUBSCRIBE bosnet-digest
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Kosova Updates: http://www.alb-net.com/
B o s N e t Web Page: http://www.bosnet.org/
Arrest Karadzic/Mladic Petition: http://www.bosnet.org/petition/
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 1998 Times Mirror Company
Los Angeles Times
October 3, 1998, Saturday, Home Edition
Calendar; Part F; Page 1; Entertainment Desk
HOWARD ROSENBERG / TELEVISION
THIS 'SHOT' OF SARAJEVO IS RIGHT ON TARGET
Perilously exposed in the open, a small boy lugs plastic bottles of
water beside his mother in besieged, surrounded, chaotic, war-ravaged
Sarajevo, where Serbs, Muslims and Croats once coexisted serenely.
Suddenly the bottles fly from his arms as he falls dead from a Bosnian
Serb sniper's bullet.
Then an older man.
Then a woman pushing a baby carriage.
Then another woman running toward her.
U.S. viewers watched similar sights on television newscasts from Sarajevo
and the fractious Balkans in the early 1990s. As then, however, this
carefully scoped-out slaughter of innocents remains so unthinkable, so
impossible to reconcile with any military objective, that it appears
almost surreal in HBO's "Shot Through the Heart." This production is for
anyone who's up for a bull's-eye of a small film that lifts the veil of
abstraction from victims of the bloody conflict fought among Bosnian
Serbs, Muslims and Croats.
Drawn from a Details magazine article by American journalist John Falk,
"Shot Through the Heart" is essentially a true story about two champion
marksmen and close friends from childhood who became enemies during this
war, even though there was no personal grievance between them. They were
just swept up.
Although a dramatist's dream come true, the scenario was nightmarish in
real life: one friend becoming a master sniper, the other an anti-sniper
stalking him and, in the HBO film, at least, ultimately facing a decision
a bit like the Polish mother in "Sophie's Choice" who was able to save her
son only by surrendering her daughter to Nazi murderers.
Directed by David Attwood without one false emotion, "Shot Through the
Heart" has the tone and pacing of a good independent theatrical feature,
affirming HBO as the creative soul of TV filmdom. Only its pay-cable
competitor Showtime is making movies that even approach HBO's vision,
quality and riskiness.
This one also has in its favor strong performances by a relatively
small-name cast and texture provided by filming in Budapest, with a
smaller amount in Sarajevo, where World War I began in 1914 and the Winter
Olympics were held 70 years later as an ironic feel good prologue to the
massacres there less than a decade later.
The movie's clear aggressors are the Bosnian Serbs--or Chetniks, as they
were called--even though vague references here allude to simmering hatreds
arising from past abuses of Serbs by Croats and Muslims.
*
Although "Shot Through the Heart" doesn't untangle the politics, its sad
and stunning human story is an eternal one about war that transcends
ethnic and national divisions as well as the Dayton, Ohio, peace agreement
signed by these combatants. That was in 1995.
Flashback to 1992, though, when Bosnian Serb leader Radavan Karadzic's
creation of a Serbian Republic of Bosnia ultimately becomes a crossroads
for Vladimir (Vlado) Sarzhinsky (Linus Roache) and Slavko Simic (Vincent
Perez), who are longtime dear friends and possibly the two best
sharpshooters in what until recently had been greater Yugoslavia. They
spent weekends and shot at a gun club together.
A Serb, ladies' man Slavko is called into the Bosnian Serb army and seems
to relish it. A prosperous businessman, the Polish Croatian Vlado remains
in Sarajevo with his Muslim wife, Maida (Lia Williams), and their young
daughter, becoming one of the city's defenders against the attacking
Bosnian Serbs.
Now comes the sheer barbarism, with Bosnian Serb gunners shelling the
city, turning nearly every Sarajevo street into a combat zone, and
blasting Vlado and his family from their apartment.
Somewhere in the hills overlooking the city, meanwhile, Slavko is an
officer in charge of training Bosnian Serb snipers, and a cold-blooded
commander tells these agents of psychological warfare, many of whom will
be killing their former neighbors: "Men, women, children . . . you see a
target, you fire. Your job is to terrorize."
Like the Nazi commandant popping Jewish prisoners from afar for the sheer
sport of it in "Schindler's List," the Bosnian Serbs see dehumanized
abstractions through their scopes: A girl sits on her front stoop speaking
into her tape recorder. Then, just like that, she's dead, later to be
buried under the street because the cemeteries are full.
"This is war," says Slavko about pulling the trigger on women and children
going about their business.
"When he shot someone, joy spread across his face," the Falk article
quotes someone saying about Slavko.
*
Each time a sniper pulled a trigger, though, he potentially exposed
himself to an enemy sniper. And the anti-sniper Vlado's tracking of his
old friend--whom he suspects of terrorizing his own neighborhood--poses a
wrenching moral dilemma that Guy Hibbert's script resolves truthfully
while also taking significant liberties with the Falk article on which it
is based.
Sarajevo is again peaceful, Vlado told a July gathering of entertainment
writers in Los Angeles. "For the past two and three years, people are
coming back, and they are living together," he said. "They have to live
together. We have to live together."
The concept of living together is still not universally endorsed, however.
Hence, the action has moved elsewhere, with reports now surfacing about
ethnic Albanians--mostly women, children and elderly men--being massacred
by Serb forces in separatist Kosovo.
Reading this in the newspaper, you think about the hardening grind of war.
And you recall what Falk wrote about the lesson Vlado himself had learned
one evening after killing five Chetniks and not feeling much of anything
immediately afterward: "Killing is easy. You pull a trigger or stab with a
knife, and the other man stops moving. It's either you or him."
*
"Shot Through the Heart" can be seen at 8 p.m. Sunday and again at 10:15
p.m. Tuesday on HBO. The network has rated it TV-MA-LV (may be unsuitable
for children under the age of 17, with advisories for coarse language and
violence).
PHOTO: Vincent Perez, left, Linus Roache in "Shot Through the Heart."
PHOTOGRAPHER: CRAIG BLANKENHORN
-------------------------------------
Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company
The Boston Globe
October 2, 1998, Friday, City Edition; Pg. D22
A friendship pierces heart of war
By John Koch, Globe Staff
SHOT THROUGH THE HEART
Written by: Guy Hibert
Directed by: David Attwood
Starring: Linus Roache, Vincent Perez, and Lia Williams
On: HBO; Date: Sunday at 8 p.m.
If Hollywood movies tend to be inhumanly monumental and stuffed with
money rather than artistry, HBO movies often offer an antidote. Coming
this weekend on the cable channel is a fine case in point, a wrenching
film about the disintegration of Sarajevo called "Shot Through the Heart."
It takes place in 1992 when the peaceable multiethnic metropolis broke
apart - not just physically, but culturally and emotionally - under
Bosnian Serb assault. Sensitively filmed partially on location in the
ravaged city, this is no ordinary war film. (It debuts on HBO Sunday at 8
p.m.)
Based on real people and events, it's a story about intimacy and civility
under fire, an account of the destruction of friendship, the fragmentation
of families, the breakdown of years of urban amity. It is a piercingly sad
story, tightly focused on its principal characters, simply told, and
beautifully acted by, among others, costar Linus Roache as Vlado
Sarzinsky.
Before the Yugoslavian breakup, Vlado was a serious recreational marksman.
He and best friend Slavko Simic, buddies from boyhood, often competed
together for the national shooting team and won medals in various Eastern
European capitals. "Shot Through the Heart" begins by evoking their warm
camaraderie as they fire at targets of olives on sticks and party at
Vlado's weekend retreat.
The tragedy of "Shot Through the Heart" is that while their friendship is
never really extinguished, they become mortal enemies. When Slavco is
called up to serve with the forces of Radovan Karadzic, he not only
instructs other snipers but becomes the Bosnian Serbs' most precise killer
of once-fellow Sarajevans.
He nonetheless remains loyal to his old friend, and twice tries to help
Vlado, a Croat, and his Muslim wife flee the besieged city. But even after
enemy artillery showers their apartment with glass, the Sarzinskys refuse
to leave their hometown. Perhaps because of the skillful, sympathetic
evocation of the city and its people, it's easy to identify with his
family's disbelief as this friendly, cosmopolitan city rapidly becomes a
murderous, rubble-strewn hell.
Nothing is more fiendish than the deaths delivered by the distant Serb
snipers. In one scene, notable for its absence of Hollywood flames and
fury, the 12-year-old daughter of the Sarzinskys' best friends is picked
off in front of her apartment building. A dull pop sounds, and she slumps
to the stoop, rag-doll-like, a dark little hole in her forehead.
Why a man like Slavco becomes an accomplice in such slaughter, and why he
accepts an evicted, probably murdered, Muslim family's suburban house as a
reward for his triggerwork is a mystery "Shot Though the Heart" can't
solve. It just presents the contradictions, Slavco's warmth and loyalty
along with his hatred and will to kill, and fuses them in Vincent Perez's
appealingly loose, chillingly credible performance.
Vlado's motives for turning to violence himself are easier to understand
and, among its many virtues, the movie refuses to spin his counter-sniping
into a predictable revenge saga.
This is a film filled with complex human feeling, finely modulated by its
ensemble of adult and child actors. The inevitable "shot through the
heart" fired near the end evinces neither pleasure nor satisfaction, as it
almost certainly would in any more conventional Hollywood versions of the
same story.
It's not a perfect movie. The script doesn't, for instance, sufficiently
explain the rather mysterious group of counter-snipers Vlado joins and
helps to train. But director David Attwood's instincts even here are
understandable: He correctly wants to keep our undistracted attention
fixed on the powerful emotional content of the story. And for the most
part, he succeeds admirably.
The result is an intense and memorable movie, the likes of which are hard
to find on the big screen.
--------------------------
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
October 2, 1998, Friday, Late Edition - Final
Section E; Part 1; Page 30
TV WEEKEND
The Bonds of Friendship, Suddenly Shattered by War
By Ron Wertheimer
Like scores of other television movies, "Shot Through the Heart" is
based on real events. But unlike so many of the others, this drama feels
brutally real. That is so not only because the film believably grabs its
locale and plot from the news, but also because it paints a memorable
portrait of ordinary people transformed by extraordinary circumstances.
The HBO film, to be seen on Sunday night, is based on an article about the
war in Bosnia by John Falk, a freelance reporter, in the November 1995
issue of Details magazine. Mr. Falk distilled the anguish of sectarian
warfare to the most intimate terms by describing two men, friends since
youth, whose bond is shattered by the bloody conflict: one is a Serb, the
other a Croat married to a Muslim. The friends are champion riflemen who
once won honor for themselves and for Yugoslavia by firing harmlessly at
target ranges. Now that there is no more Yugoslavia, they have learned to
train their sights on the citizens of Sarajevo.
The essence of the script, by Guy Hibbert, comes right out of Mr. Falk's
account. As the story opens, Vlado Sarzhinsky and Slavko Simic are
enjoying some friendly target practice. Slavko, the Serb (Vincent Perez),
has always been the superior shot. He is a carefree bachelor who dotes on
Vlado (Linus Roache), his wife, Maida (Lia Williams), and their daughter
(Karianne Henderson).
They all enjoy comfortable lives in their cosmopolitan city. But this is
1992. Radovan Karadzic declares the establishment of a Serbian nation. His
army begins a wave of attacks, the manifestations of long-simmering ethnic
animosity. Slavko is called, initially to train the Bosnian Serb army's
recruits; he tells his flabbergasted friend that he will report.
Slavko also begs Vlado to get his family out of the country, offering to
help them escape to Vienna. Vlado refuses to believe that he must abandon
his home. "We're Europeans, for God's sake," he declares. "The moment we
walk away, we lose everything." He soon understands how quickly everything
can be lost.
But it's too late to escape, and Vlado watches as Sarajevo deteriorates
into a war zone. Serbian snipers kill people on the streets and in their
homes. Vlado and his rifle join the city's defenders. When he is told
that one sniper is able to shoot his victims in the head from a tremendous
distance, Vlado knows he must stop the man. And he knows who the man must
be.
Considering its horrific subject, the film, directed by David Attwood on
location in Sarajevo and Budapest, is understated. The war assaults the
viewer's consciousness through the torturous accumulation of mundane
losses.
In a remarkable performance, Mr. Roache ("The Wings of the Dove") charts
Vlado's transformation from self-satisfied middle-class businessman to
grizzled guerrilla, investing him with more regret than vengeance. His
scenes with Ms. Williams (a Tony nominee for "Skylight") quietly locate
the shattered hearts of people whose lives have been stolen.
When their daughter's friend has been killed on her own doorstep, Maida
tells her husband, "They can't bury her at the cemetery." He asks why not,
and she nearly whispers, "It's full." Ms. Williams turns those simple
words into a chilling pronouncement.
[...]
SHOT THROUGH THE HEART HBO, Sunday night at 8
Written by Guy Hibbert and directed by David Attwood. Su Armstrong,
producer. An Alliance Communications/Company Pictures/ Transatlantic Media
Associates co-production in association with the BBC and LeFrak
Productions. Francine LeFrak and Robert Lantos, executive producers.
WITH: Linus Roache (Vlado), Vincent Perez (Slavko), Lia Williams (Maida)
and Karianne Henderson (Nadja).
Photo: Linus Roache with Karianne Henderson, left, and Lia Williams.
(Craig Blankenhorn/HBO)
______________________________________________________________________
Opinions expressed/published on BosNet/BosNet-B DO NOT necessarily
reflect the views of (all of the members of) Editorial Board, and/or
moderators, nor any of their host institutions.
______________________________________________________________________