‘Vukovar’ Takes Grim Look at Love in War

“Vukovar” takes its title from one of the former Yugoslavia’s most beautiful cities, an ancient, picturesque Serb/Croat border town along the Danube. It opens just as the crumbling of the Berlin Wall is being seen on TV around the world, and in Vukovar a young couple, Anna (Mirjana Jokovic) and Toma (Boris Isakovic), take it as a good omen for their imminent marriage. They couldn’t be more wrong.

Indeed, their wedding procession down Vukovar’s main street confronts a parade of demonstrators coming from the opposite direction shouting, “Long Live Croatia!” For the first time Anna and Toma are made to consider that she is a Croat and Toma is a Serb since they are inhabitants of a community that didn’t make distinctions, especially in the younger generation. Very shortly thereafter Toma is drafted.

Veteran filmmaker Boro Draskovic, a half-Croatian and half-Bosnian Serb, does a superb job in depicting the way in which war can sneak up on you unawares--the way in which what strikes you as an absurdity can become real with a dizzying, lethal swiftness. No sooner do the skirmishes start than the citizenry of Vukovar becomes vulnerable to wandering bands of thugs. It takes no time at all for an earthly paradise to become hell on Earth.

“Vukovar” is an intensely European film, establishing the civility and sophistication of Anna and Toma and their families that represent millennia of culture that tragically can be swept away in virtually an instant. Draskovic, who underlines this point with lots of Mozart on the soundtrack, gives us an aerial tour of a swath of the former Yugoslavia that abounds in natural beauty and magnificent architecture; at the end of the film he contrasts it with a similar tour showing nothing but seemingly endless devastation.

Films don’t get much more relentless than “Vukovar” as civilization crumbles before our very eyes, with Anna, who is pregnant, and Toma becoming desperate in their eagerness to see each other and then merely to survive. Toma and Anna endure increasing hardship and danger, culminating in a gang rape--the ethnic identity of the rapists is deliberately left unknown--of Anna. As his film becomes darker and darker Draskovic effectively evolves his style from the lyrical to the operatic, the better to express a spiraling horror so intense that it takes on a hallucinatory quality. (One nightmarish sequence has a wounded Toma cared for by a trio of harpies who seem like the witches of “Macbeth.”)

There’s no getting around how grueling it is to watch “Vukovar,” whose young lovers are so appealing--and so brutalized by war. Draskovic drives home the evil of warfare in general and specifically the tragedy that has engulfed the former Yugoslavia so horrendously in the name of various ethnic purities that seem as perplexing to many of Draskovic’s people as they do to us. It’s all too sadly appropriate that despite Draskovic’s clear attempt at objectivity the Croatian government blocked the screening of this courageous and potent anti-war film at the United Nations.

* MPAA rating: Unrated. Times guidelines: The film contains much realistic warfare and destruction and an especially brutal rape scene; there is also some nudity.

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‘Vukovar’

Mirjana Jokovic: Anna

Boris Isakovic: Toma

Monica Romic: Ratka

A Tara Releasing presentation of a Dan Films production. Director Boro Draskovic. Producer Danka Muzdeka Mandzuka. Executive producer Steven North. Screenplay by Maja and Boro Draskovic. Cinematographer Aleksander Petkovic. Editor Snezana Ivanovic. Art director Miodrag Maric.orcus Miller. Production design Ina Mayhew. Set decorator Paul Weathered. In Serbo-Croatian, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 34 minutes.

* Exclusively at the Monica 4-Plex, 1332 2nd. St., Santa Monica, (310) 394-9741.