02/20/98
MOVIE REVIEW: Welcome to Sarajevo
From a cool distance, emotional war story lacks passion

By MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal-Bulletin Arts Writer

**1/2 (out of five)
Starring Stephen Dillane, Woody Harrelson, Marisa Tomei, Emira Nusevic, Kerry Fox, Goran Visnjic, Emily Lloyd. A Miramax Films release written by Frank Cottrell Boyce from the book Natasha's Story by Michael Nicholson, directed by Michael Winterbottom. Portions of the film are in Bosnian with English subtitles. Rated R, contains violence, nudity, profanity. Running time: 100 minutes.

Considering that Welcome to Sarajevo was filmed on location in that battle-torn Bosnian city and that it revolves around the true story of a British journalist who rescued a young girl from the horrors of war, it's amazing that the film doesn't make much of an emotional impact.

At the end of Welcome to Sarajevo you should be awash in tears. But director Michael Winterbottom presents everything in such a matter-of-fact, semi-documentary and cool style that it's dispassionate rather than passionate. It's like a weak TV movie based on real events. The facts are there in 1-2-3 fashion, but not much of the heart and certainly not much of the tension. The only surprising thing is that, in wartime, everyone seemed to have plenty of cigarettes.

Part of the problem is that Winterbottom has combined too many elements and not enough characterization. His use of real TV news footage of the war in the small republic of Bosnia, where the Christian Serbs tried to eliminate the Muslim majority as Yugoslavia was breaking apart, is a mistake. The footage is often frightening and powerful, but eventually it distances us from the film, the way we were removed from the war's real events by watching them at home in our comfortable living rooms.

For a long time the film lacks a central focus. It seems to be about burned-out journalist Michael Henderson (Stephen Dillane), who has been covering the war too long and is frustrated by the lack of interest his stories excite back home. At one point, his story about a group of orphans is upstaged on the TV news by the impending divorce of the Duke and Duchess of York.

In the midst of the carnage and bombardments, he takes a shine to a young girl named Emira (Emira Nusevic) in an orphanage. He promises to take the sad-eyed girl out of Sarajevo, a promise she reminds him about when an American social worker comes to take away some of the babies and the youngest children in a deal brokered with the Serb attackers. Emira is too old to qualify for the Serb deal, but eventually Henderson works behind the scenes to take her away with him to England.

All this would have worked better if Winterbottom and writer Frank Cottrell Boyce had created some loving scenes between Henderson and Emira to show a growing father-daughter relationship. But, like too much of the film, it's presented at a cool distance. A sequence in which a group of Serb mercenaries waylays the bus in which Emira and the other children are making their way to the airport is scary, one of the few tension-filled moments in the film. But it would have been even more so had the bond between Henderson and Emira been stronger.

American actors Woody Harrelson and Marisa Tomei take small roles as a daredevil TV reporter and a committed social worker respectively.

Harrelson gives the film a human quality as opposed to the coolness of the rest. On the other hand, his presence can be jarring, particularly in the opening sequence when he boldly walks down a street in the midst of sniper fire. At that point one expects that the film will be about him when, really, he plays a minor character.