The Living and the Dead (2007)
Reviewer: Pierre Badiola
Release Date: 21st February (UK DVD)
Director: Kristijan Milic
Cast: Filip Sovagovic, Borko Peric, Velibor Topic, Slaven Knezovic
Some of you may know that musician/screenwriter Nick Cave actually penned a sequel to Ridley Scott’s The Gladiator in which Russel Crowe becomes an eternal war machine, battling through different periods in time in a myriad of different wars. That never came to fruition. However this 2007 Croatian war film by first-time director Kristijan Milic, based on the book by co-writer Josip Mlakic, comes close to that idea.
Set in both 1943 and 1993, the film charts the fate of two separate Croatian military companies fighting in separate Bosnian territorial wars. The threads connecting them are tenuous, yet the plot darts back and forth between both eras as each group negotiates dangerous enemy territory surrounding the ominously named “Graveyard Field”.
There isn’t much characterisation amongst the varied cast of soldiers, many of whom have just enough screen time to say a sentence or two before meeting their quick end. There are however a few who act as generational archetypes, parallels or connectors that bridge the seemingly meaningless gap between the wars. Inexperienced youths, morally conflicted soldiers and hardened war veterans are amidst both squads and give the cross-cutting some thematic structure as their experiences begin to mirror each other.
Where the film really comes into it’s own and elevates itself over other war stories is in it’s, for the lack of a better word, ‘supernatural’ elements that begin to creep in as each company nears the old war graveyard the aforementioned field was named after. As the casualties pile up and the conflicts become ever more frequent, the ghosts of dead soldiers begin to haunt the living. Whether this is a product of their declining sanity, their sleeplessness or more metaphysical matters I won’t spoil here, but the conflation of tense action sequences and supernatural occurrences in the last act that culminate in a hauntingly effective final shot make for thrilling viewing.
Shot through a drained sepia and fraught with some artfully directed firefights, this has all the dressing of a typical war film -- but there is a strong anti-war message at the center of it all, and the journey Living and the Dead takes to get to it is rather unique. It’s a case of history repeating; a lament of the endless march of war.
The Living And The Dead is out on DVD on the 21st of February in the UK.
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