Film Review: The Tour (Turneja)
The Munich Film Festival started yesterday. I'm not sure how many reviews I'll manage, but the first film I saw (today), The Tour was so great I had to post immediately. If you're a Babylon 5 or Lost fan, you might be interest to learn that Mira Furlan (Delenn on B5 and Danielle Rousseau on Lost) has a central role in it and is absolutely fantastic. First time I saw her performing in her own language (the film is subtitled), and I'll get to the difference that makes in a minute. But even if you're unfamiliar with either show and/or hated every minute Mira Furlan's characters spent on screen, you'll want to watch it. Because it's the best film to have a troupe of actors confronting the absurd horror and the horrible absurdity of war since Ernst Lubitsch made To Be Or Not To Be. Because it's set in Bosnia in 1993, and it's not a film made by Americans, Germans, English, French or any "outside" nation but one made in Serbia in 2008. Because it's an ensemble film, with affection for all its characters who consequently feel immensely real. Because it manages that rare thing, to unite comedy, black humour and respect for human life, and the tragedies through which its heroes stumble, a troupe of actors from Belgrad who were supppposedly hired just for a quick troupe entertaining gig but end up being dragged through three war zones. Because it's deeply humanist in its conclusions, without ever being preachy.
There's also the question of what words, what art can do in such a time like this. At the start, the actors - some former stars whose glory days are behind them, as well as a young ingenue - just prepare an old Feydeau farce, something easy; their types feel familiar, as does their bickering. But en route to their first destination, when their IDs are controlled for the first time, they're asked if any of them is a Muslim. No, all serbs, they hasten to say (not true, btw as it later turns out, Mira Furlan's character, the actress Sonja, is Croatian), and you start to get a sense of the paranoid wartime atmosphere. The French farce they've prepared falls completely flat, with the soldiers more interested in seeing the young ingenue take of some of her clothes. And the tea they get served has blood in it because of the field surgeon who shares it with them. But later, when just about everything else that can go wrong has gone wrong and they managed to end up through various circumstances not with the Serbian but the Croatian army, Sonja plays out a scene from another old play of hers for their captors, and suddenly they have a spell-bound audience, they share laughter... right until one of the actors puts his foot in his mouth and says something to reveal their origin. Still later, back behind Serbian frontlines, they encounter another artist hired to entertain the army, a writer named Ljubic who writes fervent nationalistic tripe. Ljubic has a whole speech about how artists can make a difference, how words can. This has been his experience. As it turns out, he called for ethnic cleansing on tv, something the actors are reminded of when they get captured in his company by Muslim soldiers. Which is when the last scene-from-play-within-a-movie comes to play out, and encompasses the film's beliefs, that words can make a difference, for ill or good both.
The Tour is written and directed by Goran Markovic, based on his play, but it never feels "stagey" in the sense of not using its changed medium. On the contrary. Watching this, you wonder how he originally managed to get the impact of several scenes depending on a close-up, or on the war-torn region around them. Then again: the story trusts its actors, in more than one way. As for Mira Furlan: different as Delenn and Rousseau are, I think in both cases you sometimes have a certain rigidity, in lack of a better word, about her speech and body language, which is completely missing here, and I do suspect it's the language which makes the difference. (Of course, I suspect this particular role might have been written for her, because it's a showcase for an actress, with some many aspects to it - the star-just-past-her-glory-days thing, the relationship she used to have with one of the other actors, Zaki, who was a young stud back in the day and now is old and fat, but with a mighty voice still, the sheer stubbornness in at first refusing to acknowledge the reality of her situation, and then the sequence where she changes before the eyes of both the film audience and the troupe of Croatian soldiers into a young girl again, just by voice and body language alone, and you don't need to know the play her scene is from. The horror and heartbreak when she sees someone executed in front of her. (We don't, btw; the expression in Mira Furlan's face says it all.) It's an awesome, awesome performance.
"We used to love you," says the Muslim captain near the end of the film to the actors. "Do you have any idea how much we used to love you?" He's not being nostalgic, he's being accusing - which makes the moment so tense and suspensful - but at this point, the audience does have an idea. Because we love these actors as well.
There's also the question of what words, what art can do in such a time like this. At the start, the actors - some former stars whose glory days are behind them, as well as a young ingenue - just prepare an old Feydeau farce, something easy; their types feel familiar, as does their bickering. But en route to their first destination, when their IDs are controlled for the first time, they're asked if any of them is a Muslim. No, all serbs, they hasten to say (not true, btw as it later turns out, Mira Furlan's character, the actress Sonja, is Croatian), and you start to get a sense of the paranoid wartime atmosphere. The French farce they've prepared falls completely flat, with the soldiers more interested in seeing the young ingenue take of some of her clothes. And the tea they get served has blood in it because of the field surgeon who shares it with them. But later, when just about everything else that can go wrong has gone wrong and they managed to end up through various circumstances not with the Serbian but the Croatian army, Sonja plays out a scene from another old play of hers for their captors, and suddenly they have a spell-bound audience, they share laughter... right until one of the actors puts his foot in his mouth and says something to reveal their origin. Still later, back behind Serbian frontlines, they encounter another artist hired to entertain the army, a writer named Ljubic who writes fervent nationalistic tripe. Ljubic has a whole speech about how artists can make a difference, how words can. This has been his experience. As it turns out, he called for ethnic cleansing on tv, something the actors are reminded of when they get captured in his company by Muslim soldiers. Which is when the last scene-from-play-within-a-movie comes to play out, and encompasses the film's beliefs, that words can make a difference, for ill or good both.
The Tour is written and directed by Goran Markovic, based on his play, but it never feels "stagey" in the sense of not using its changed medium. On the contrary. Watching this, you wonder how he originally managed to get the impact of several scenes depending on a close-up, or on the war-torn region around them. Then again: the story trusts its actors, in more than one way. As for Mira Furlan: different as Delenn and Rousseau are, I think in both cases you sometimes have a certain rigidity, in lack of a better word, about her speech and body language, which is completely missing here, and I do suspect it's the language which makes the difference. (Of course, I suspect this particular role might have been written for her, because it's a showcase for an actress, with some many aspects to it - the star-just-past-her-glory-days thing, the relationship she used to have with one of the other actors, Zaki, who was a young stud back in the day and now is old and fat, but with a mighty voice still, the sheer stubbornness in at first refusing to acknowledge the reality of her situation, and then the sequence where she changes before the eyes of both the film audience and the troupe of Croatian soldiers into a young girl again, just by voice and body language alone, and you don't need to know the play her scene is from. The horror and heartbreak when she sees someone executed in front of her. (We don't, btw; the expression in Mira Furlan's face says it all.) It's an awesome, awesome performance.
"We used to love you," says the Muslim captain near the end of the film to the actors. "Do you have any idea how much we used to love you?" He's not being nostalgic, he's being accusing - which makes the moment so tense and suspensful - but at this point, the audience does have an idea. Because we love these actors as well.