Giving up the ghost proves an arduous task taller than many men and women in Danis Tanovic's Circus Columbia, a deceptively breezy and very smart little drama concerning the lives of a splintered family in Bosnia-Herzegovina on the eve of the Bosnian War. The wounds still being licked by Divko (Miki Manojlovic) and Lucija (Mira Furlan) are at once bracingly political and personal, as evidenced by the seemingly heartless actions of Divko upon his return to the small town after 20 years of exile in Germany.
Within minutes of arriving in his homeland, Divko has thrown Lucija out of the home they lived in together (but he has been paying for) and met Martin (Boris Ler), the young son he left behind who is now a young man. Raised by a communist mayor and a high-ranking soldier, Martin acts as the narrative's central fulcrum, a drawn-faced analogy for the soul of his country and Tanovic's obvious proxy -- the Yugoslavian filmmaker was 23 when war broke out -- but he is not a mere rigid metaphorical unit surveying the chaos. As Lucija and Divko fight over his affiliation, Martin steals some time with Azra (Jelena Stupljanin), Divko's much younger, ruby-red-haired fiancée, and, in the film's sole obvious ploy, attempts to reach America via a fixed-up CB radio.
Written by the director, Circus Columbia is an essentially modest film, despite its oft-forgotten, hugely complex backdrop, but its triumphs are not easily gained. The film, as has been noted, shares the lived-in feeling of Elia Suleiman's caustic Israeli comedies, but Tanovic's sense of alienation is subtle where Suleiman's is furious and unrelenting, almost abrasive. The details are exquisite, including a bust of patron saint of Non-Alignment, Josip Broz Tito, in the mayor's home and a Lindenstraße joke. These personal touches are conveyed beautifully by Tanovic and never seem to jut out, as they so often do in films that use realism as window dressing. The melancholy shared by all the members of the central family blows through the town like a rare, gentle gust of wind shaking the branches of fig trees and relieving the unbearable heat for one brief moment.Everyone suffers: Martin's best friend begins to taunt and alienate him, Lucija must make a war-torn flat her new home, Azra's genuine love and lust for her husband-to-be is consistently rebuffed. But Divko is a figure of great tragedy, attempting to not-so-slyly reconstruct the life he left behind 20 years ago through strategic uses of money, fraternity, paternalism and political affiliation; what else might one expect from a man who keeps a black cat around for good luck? Tanovic shrewdly mirrors the fears and memories of Divko, Lucija and Martin in a litany of personas in the town, from Svetislav Goncic's confused soldier to Milan Strljic's conniving conspirator to Mario Knezovic's bullying coward.
That Tanovic does indulge in certain familiar narrative strands is a minor hit against the film but one that is easily ignored when the emotional heft hits with such force without feeling obnoxious or chastising. Nine years or so after upsetting Amelie to win the Oscar for No Man's Land, his last film of real note, Tanovic has made a movie that comes even closer than that highly admirable work to reaching a sublime balance between the personal and the political, and further exploring the rich, largely untapped emotional terrains of a country that faded out of most people's minds by the time Spielberg was recreating the storming of Normandy Beach.
AKA Cirkus Columbia
