The Plight of a City Forgotten

“Welcome to Sarajevo” is more than a title, it reflects a fierce and focused determination on the part of its makers to teach the lessons of that city’s beleaguered past to a wider world. When a character pleads for the world’s attention by saying, “Everyone must know we are dying,” she is speaking for the film as well as herself.

Directed by Michael Winterbottom, “Welcome to Sarajevo” blends drama, re-creation and reality in a serious attempt not to be the typical multimillion-dollar film about an embattled region with Woody Harrelson in a leading role. And while it accomplishes this to a considerable extent, complete success is not to be.

What Winterbottom and screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce have aimed to do is twofold. On the one hand, they want to tell the tale, based on a book called “Natasha’s Story,” of how a British journalist became involved in the fate of a 9-year-old Bosnian orphan.

But more than that they want to re-create what Boyce has described as a Dantesque walk through hell. Frustrated with a West that was often indifferent to Sarajevo’s horrific plight, a West that chose to change the channel or assume that that city’s citizens had little in common with the rest of Europe and America, “Welcome to Sarajevo” is intent on redressing the balance in one compelling cinematic swoop.

Given how difficult it is to awaken a complacent public, that “Sarajevo” manages to make even a dent in the overall lethargy is impressive. Part of the reason is that director Winterbottom, witness his work on last year’s “Jude,” has a rigorous style that downplays emotional material. So one thing this film is not is awkwardly sentimental.

Also, though “Sarajevo” does have its share of recognizable faces, including Harrelson as a larger-than-life American journalist named Flynn and Marisa Tomei as an international aid worker, their roles are carefully circumscribed and kept from taking over the picture.

As played by British stage and television actor Stephen Dillane, Michael Henderson, the ITN network’s man in Sarajevo, is presented as the journalistic opposite number of the gregarious, chance-taking Flynn. Humorless, driven, all-business, his self-proclaimed motto is “We’re not here to help, we’re here to report.”

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Then happenstance brings Henderson into contact with an orphanage on the city’s front lines. Troubled by what he’s experienced, and perhaps fed up with his own distance, he does a series of stories on the place and becomes intrigued by a strong-minded girl named Emira (Emira Nusevic). And when Tomei’s inexperienced but determined aid worker arrives with a dicey plan to take children out, the journalist is faced with a decision with complex ramifications.

As noted, “Sarajevo” is determined not to be just a single journalist’s story, and one way it avoids that is by providing a telling picture of the tenor of life under the siege. Hardly a documentary and not averse to changing details to give its narration more impact and increase its chances of winning hearts and minds, “Sarajevo” nevertheless does an affecting job of re-creating the emotional texture of that city’s plight.

But bearing witness can be a complex thing and in its concern to illuminate “Sarajevo” is prone to overkill, to trying too hard to squeeze in every troubling wartime incident. But without an intrinsic reason to be on screen, segments like the discovery of Serb-run concentration camps and Flynn’s off-the-cuff comment about why the U.S. didn’t support anti-Serb air strikes can feel forced and arbitrary.

Even more jarring is Winterbottom’s decision--again made as a reminder of the real horror behind the story--to include approximately 10 minutes of documentary material in the film. This grim footage, which mixes uneasily with the drama and calls attention to its artificiality, is a miscalculation, a gamble that has not paid off. But while “Welcome to Sarajevo” may not be the kind of film you fall in love with, you can’t help but respect it the morning after.

* MPAA rating: R, for brutal images/war atrocities and language. Times guidelines: shocking and gory newsreel footage.

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‘Welcome to Sarajevo’

Stephen Dillane: Henderson

Woody Harrelson: Flynn

Marisa Tomei: Nina

Emira Nusevic: Emira

Kerry Fox: Jane Carson

Goran Visnjic: Risto

Emily Lloyd: Annie McGee

A Dragon Pictures production with Channel Four Films, released by Miramax Films. Director Michael Winterbottom. Producers Graham Broadbent, Damian Jones. Screenplay Frank Cottrell Boyce, based on the book “Natasha’s Story” by Michael Nathanson. Cinematographer Daf Hobson. Editor Trevor Waite. Costumes Janty Yates. Music Adrian Johnston. Production design Mark Geraghty. Art director David Minty. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

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