“A Perfect Day” — Four stars with Benicio Del Toro, Tim Robbins, Melanie Thierry, Olga Kurylenko.
In a never-ending war zone, Benicio Del Toro
fights for peace. Director: Fernando Leon de Aranoa. (1:46). R: Strong
language, graphic images. At the IFC Center, and on demand.
“A Perfect Day” is about people at the end of their rope. Literally.
In a fine movie underscoring the insanity of war, Benicio Del Toro
and Tim Robbins are two American aid workers in the mid-’90s Balkans.
Today’s assignment? Get a corpse out of a local well before it makes the
water undrinkable — and the village uninhabitable.
Now...how to do that, exactly?
The surprisingly difficult job is going to take up most of the next 24
hours. Del Toro and Robbins, aided by newbie volunteer Melanie Thierry
and visiting U.N. official Olga Kurylenko, frantically speed from one
warring town to another, looking for rope.
Some is already being used to tie up rabid dogs. A lot is being saved
by villagers in case they need to hang anyone — maybe even Del Toro and
Robbins, if they don’t stop poking around and asking questions.
So back they get into the jeep, driving on and still looking.
There have been plenty of grim movies about the Balkan conflict,
including Angelina Jolie’s wrenching “In the Land of Blood and Honey.”
But Spanish director Fernando Leon de Aranoa’s take is touched with dark
humor.
He doesn’t play the horror for laughs. He and his heroes simply see the
absurdity of violence, the idiocy of bigotry. If they smile, it’s only
because they don’t have time for tears.
Both actors are fine, if firmly typed. Del Toro is the macho man of
action, Robbins the mellow counter-culture survivor. Thierry provides
some warm emotion as the scared newcomer. Only Kurylenko feels a little
expendable, as a former Del Toro hook-up.
Director de Aranoa keeps things moving, though, with a firm sense of
pace and a rough, punk-edged soundtrack. At least until the final choice
of Marlene Dietrich singing “Where Have all the Flowers Gone?” That
pushes things over the sentimental edge.
There’s a great scene when the workers come upon a desolate fort — its
tattered flag defended by a single soldier, at all costs. Another
sequence takes us through a bombed-out village, still bloody from its
“ethnic cleansing.”
De Aranoa makes us feel the desperation of the refugees, the foolish
pride of the politicians and the utter frustrating pointlessness.
Even more painfully we realize that, 20 years later, only the countries have changed. The human madness remains the same.
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