WELCOME TO SARAJEVO (50)

Directed by: Michael Winterbottom

Starring: Stephen Dillane, Woody Harrelson, Marisa Tomei

The Pitch: An English reporter in war-torn Sarajevo tries to adopt a little Bosnian girl.

Theo Sez: Looks like everyone who slammed PRETTY VILLAGE, PRETTY FLAME for its pro-Serb militarism now has to look suitably shamefaced and admit that the opposite, more right-on political ideology can result in a far weaker movie. What's especially annoying is that Winterbottom is (or can be) a superb film-maker - what he does with the maudlin scene of a little girl learning that her parents have been killed is just extraordinary (cutting from the adults debating how to break the news as she sits, forlorn, in the distance straight to the aftermath - the girl centre-frame now, sobbing distractedly as the three men sit around her, looking irrelevant to her grief and a little like children themselves : everything about her tragic, precipitate coming-of-age is contained in the compositions and the sudden shift in relative sizes) ; yet the film never feels like it's been made by someone who knows or cares about politics, the way SALVADOR blazed with Oliver Stone's feel for the uses and abuses of power - it feels like the work of a Concerned aesthete bending over backwards to "empathise" with human suffering. The miseries of wartime - power cuts, petrol shortages, "Sarajevo's favourite game" (called "Is There A God?") - seem self-conscious, something to tut over (and the omelette scene was done better in KING RAT anyway), while details like the use of "Don't Worry, Be Happy" over footage of Western leaders smiling and shaking hands, doing nothing about the war, is the kind of thing that gives propaganda a bad name ; plus of course, for a film that wrings its hands endlessly over the war-as-entertainment ethos of Western TV crews, it has more than its share of eye-popping tricks and exciting Steadicam shots. Many dazzling moments, invariably followed by crude, sententious or manipulative ones ; bonus points for the psychedelic opening credits, though.