Danijel is a soldier and a Christian Serb. Ajla is a painter and a Muslim Bosnian. But on the dance floor in cosmopolitan Sarajevo, they're simply a man and a woman. Then an explosion rocks the nightclub, and the lovers find themselves on opposite sides of a centuries-old dispute.

The Bosnian war was the worst calamity to hit Europe in 50 years, and even two decades later, the wounds haven't healed. So for a filmmaker, the challenge of illuminating the sociopolitical context can be overwhelmed by the grisly particulars that few people are willing to see.

For her directorial debut, actress and humanitarian Angelina Jolie has chosen the darker and more narrow path. Audiences attracted by the name above the title will get a punch in the gut before they can digest the food for thought. It's an unrelentingly brutal film, befitting the subject matter.

In the early 1990s, after the fracturing of the Yugoslav republic, armed Serbian loyalists round up their Muslim neighbors in Bosnia-Herzegovina. As the son of a Serbian general who sees Bosnians as infidels, Danijel (Goran Kostic) is expected to lead the ethnic cleansing of his Sarajevo neighborhood. But when he spots Ajla (Zana Marjanovic) among the terrified women his soldiers are assaulting, he pulls her aside and gives her special privileges in the detention camp.

Yet if Danijel is supposed to represent the fulcrum in a moral dilemma, the character teeters so far to the dark side that it's hard to see the romance as redemptive. He laughs and drinks with his rapist comrades, and although he flinches at shooting an unarmed civilian from his sniper's nest, he's quick to point a rifle at Ajla to underscore his anguish.

With its broad strokes, this invitation to an important discussion is hard to ignore, but the blood and honey on the table is an unpalatable mix.

---

"In the Land of Blood and Honey"

Two and a half stars (out of four) • Rating R • Run time 2:07 • Content War violence, language, sexual assault and nudity • Language Serbian • Where Ronnies 20 Cine