The Pearson World Cinema Series held a viewing of the Bosnian movie “Fuse” on Oct. 22. The movie portrayed postwar Bosnia in a light of humor, while still showing the deep problems that afflicted the area at the time.
The movie began by showing a small Bosnian town, riddled with issues. There were landmines in the fields, and one even blew a character’s legs off. The town also had a human trafficking problem, with the police chief being paid to be in on it. Zaim, the former police chief, was dealing with losing his son during the war and had visions of him as a ghost. However, things changed when a helicopter flew above with the U.S. president’s limo and the town was told Bill Clinton was coming for a visit. An international committee arrived to assess the town for security shortly after. The film comedically showed office workers throwing binders of paper out the window to hide evidence of corruption. The town had other problems, much stemming from the war. No one knew what the Bosnian flag looked like, and a few didn’t even know who Clinton was. Even when they first tried to make an American flag, they made the stars red.
In an attempt to get aid from the West, the small town put on a facade. They painted over some of their buildings to make them look new, started putting up American and Bosnian friendship posters, and the mayor even borrowed some Serbian residents from a neighboring town to put on a show of unity. The fixes fooled the international committee for a bit, but it changed when they found a huge weapons stockpile in a hidden room under the town hall. The mayor and police chief blamed the weapons stash on Zaim, the former police chief in an attempt to defer the blame. However, the former chief had gone missing as he tried to look for his dead son. Eventually, the day of the visit arrives. Everything is planned and going well, until the former chief dies and something causes the presidential delegation to flee. The movie ends with the mayor’s town completely losing it, saying “We’re all dead now” after his only hopes of aid fled quicker than it had arrived.
The movie, while comedic, portrayed some deep-rooted problems in the former Yugoslav areas at the time. The portrayal of the father seeing visions of his dead son perfectly exemplifies the generational trauma of the time, as explained by Nick Pollard, a senior history major. He said, “I like the whole dynamic between the father and the invisible son as in the movie went on, especially towards the ending where we see the younger son visualizing not just the brother, but his father. I won’t spoil it too much, but the trauma from his father had from him losing his older son, is now tragic to the younger son who witnessed his father’s death.”
Many people in areas all over Bosnia and Serbia had relatives who fought and died, and had generational trauma from that. One way people coped with that was just to blame their neighbors. Giancarlo Arce, a junior history major, described it as “I found it a bit comical when they had the scene with two guys who couldn’t muster up a handshake just because one’s a Serb, one’s a Bosnian. A lot of the relationships were played for jokes, even though like in reality, they, that is kind of like how Bosnian-Serb relations worked.”
One scene in the movie explains the ridiculousness of the hatred between the two sides. The international committee shows the firefighters x-rays of their lungs and asks which are the lungs of a Bosnian and which are from a Serb. Obviously the firefighters couldn’t tell the difference. However, the inclusion of that shows even basic logic couldn’t shed the hatred between the two neighboring countries.
The World Cinema Series had comedy as this year’s theme. This movie, like the first one “El Conde,” had the idea of comedy as a coping mechanism for the great horror inflicted upon a people.
Abha Sood, Ph.D., senior lecturer in the Department of English, said, “I think satire comes to mind as I was watching it, I was thinking of this kind of novel that we teach in undergrad as well. Candide, where Voltaire represents the tyranny, talks about all the problems in the world and putting a spin on it, making a saying like “10,000 people died all for the good of the world.” You had that element (of satire) there, and I really enjoyed it.”
The World Cinema Series will feature it’s next film, “Where Do We Go Now,” on Nov. 19.
