The Perfect Circle

Savršeni krug; war drama, BiH, 1997; D: Ademir Kenović, S: Mustafa Nadarević, Almedin Leleta, Almir Podgorica, Jasna Diklić, Dragan Marinković

Sarajevo, Bosnian War. Hamza is a Bosniak poet who evacuates his wife and daughter in a bus to the Croatian territory for their safety. Upon returning back to his apartment, he discovers two little boys found refuge inside: Adis and his deaf brother Kerim, whose parents were killed inside their house by a Serb paramilitary attack. Hamza takes care of them, and a dog wounded by a sniper. The dog is given an improvised wheelchair. The siege leaves little food and firewood during the winter. Hamza decides to take the boys to a tunnel to evacuate them outside the city, to their aunt. However, a Serb sniper attacks and kills Adis. Hiding in an abandoned building, Kerim hits one Serb soldier with a log in the head, gets his machine gun and shoots the other Serb soldier. Hamza burries Adis in an improvised graveyard.

How would you live if your city was engulfed by war? In one of the best movies thematizing post-Yugoslav Wars, in this case the Siege of Sarajevo, the authors assemble a collection of episodes and vignettes of people trying to survive the wartime pressure, and since they are based on real-life anecdotes, they contain a high dose of authenticity. Augmented by screenwriter and poet Abdulah Sidren, the screenplay of "The Perfect Circle" works not only thanks to the excellent performance by the leading actor Mustafa Nadarević, but also thanks to numerous little details that all illustrate a bigger picture about war crimes of starvation and persecution. For instance, people with canisters fight over who will get water from a firetruck. In another, after Hamza visits his friend Marko, the two boys have this exchange with him: "Isn't that a Serb name? Is he a Chetnik?" - "You can't recognize a Chetnik by name." - "Then by what?" - "By killing". This shows the story refusing to treat characters and nations in black-and-white perspectives. 

During the winter, there is no heating, so the two boys suggest to burn the books to heat up the stove, but Hamza refuses and rather places old shoes in the fire. Later, when the kids watch Chaplin's film "The Gold Rush" on TV, and spot the protagonist eating a shoe, they wonder out loud that the Americans have such good shoes that they can be eaten, as opposed to their own which are only useful for fire. And in one of the most surreal and surprising moments, a one that walks on a limit of black humor, Hamza wants to impress the kids by showing them the only building with electricity in the city covered by dark night, the UNPROFOR building occupied by the French, who celebrate Christmas and dance inside, while the boys are amazed at the electricity and "how much water they have", watching from the fence. The whole movie is a meditation of helpless, fragile humanity during war and violence, embodied in Hamza, a poet, an artist who cannot understand such primitivism in civilization, and whose hallucinations of his wife and daughter signal his descend into personal madness and end. The finale is even suspenseful, presenting a sad story that serves as a monument to all the victims of the siege.

Grade:+++