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.

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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.

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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.”

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“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).