The last decade has seen actor Angelina Jolie’s celebrity status change quite a bit. Throughout the ‘90s, the world watched Jolie kiss her brother on the red carpet, wear Billy Bob Thornton’s blood vial, and generally excite us with her unrestricted promiscuity. Fast forward about 10 years, a new man, a few adoptions, and several humanitarian efforts later, the 2011 Jolie seems to be a woman on a much different mission. Jolie’s debut as a filmmaker and writer with her Bosnian war film In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011) shows that this A-list director has definitely set her sights on trying to pay tribute to the atrocities of the Bosnian War; however, Blood and Honey still has hints of the seductive starlet’s divisive past and irrefutable penchant for a good old kinky sex scene.
In the Land of Blood and Honey tells the story of Ajla (Zana Marjanovic) a young, soft-spoken, and attractive aspiring painter whose life, along with those of many around her, is torn apart once Serbian forces begin rounding up Bosnian Muslims. Danijel (Goran Kostic), a top ranking Serbian soldier unclear about his allegiance to the Serbian cause, ferrets Ajla out to continue an illicit affair that began moments before the Serbian uprising. Although Jolie’s cinematic style is quite novice, she makes it perfectly clear that Blood and Honey was made with very serious intentions. Jolie has her Serbian actors speak in their own tongue throughout the film, a commendable choice considering that we live in an age when Hollywood gets away with making foreign films in English (ahem, Hugo).
However, the sexual encounters between Ajla and Danijel are too steamy to be considered acts of purely narrative-driven love and instead become an excuse for forbidden and fetishized racy sex. Ultimately, Jolie’s determination for austerity with Blood and Honey’s message is undermined at times. The vicious rape scenes, human degradation, and graphic war sequences are presented as supplementary to Ajla and Danijel’s love story. All of the work she does to assure us of the film’s factual and grim intentions is pushed aside for the back-and-forth, fiery, sadomasochistic narrative. It seems that when the lovers’ storyline comes to a halt, so does Blood and Honey. The result is troubling because when Jolie does show us the gritty atrocities of the war, her authenticity is impressive. Blood and Honey promises us retrospection and insight into the gritty Bosnian War, but what seems to echo the loudest is Jolie’s well-known predilection for anything kinky.
