Death in Sarajevo

The film is based on French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy’s play, Hotel Europe. In the film, a production of that Levy play is briefly seen on a TV screen. It’s one of the events commemorating the anniversary of the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand which launched WW I, which launched the century of bloody international warfare, which continues where we are today. 

As the film cites its origin — the play — it establishes the theme of the present containing the past, our inability to start completely afresh but instead reviving past responses, past failures. 

Similarly, the radical interviewed on TV here, who gets killed at the end, bears the name of Ferdinand’s assassin. While he shares some of his namesake’s fervour and even politics, his murder is completely unjustified. He’s killed by a coked-up security guard who was irritated by his wife’s insistence on buying a new sofa they can’t afford. Thus a small human quirk can inflect a large current in human history. 

The film’s key phrase is “hysterical dualism” — the radical’s observation that every event in the Bosnia-Serbia history has two radically opposed versions. In one the assassin heroically killed an occupier; in the other a terrorist ended peace. 

So too Hotel Europe. The big event’s host is facing a workers’ strike because they haven’t been paid for two months. One strike leader is beaten up and his successor, a woman who spent 30 years in the laundry, is abducted The respectable management runs a crooked gambling game in the basement. So too the larger Europe for which that hotel is a microcosm. 

In “hysterical dualism” history has been replaced by hysteria. Madness pervades. The irrational has swept into the vacuum created by the abandonment of reason, principle, morality. Nationalism supplants humanity. If the film finds in its setting hotel a representation of the violent and abusive politics of contemporary Europe, North America can’t feel complacent. Not since Trump’s election. 

The film’s most respectable characters are the elegant hotel employee Lamija and the French dignitary who retires to his room to rehearse his speech. We don’t know if he’s a politician or an actor — for that seems no longer a pertinent distinction. He does have a strong political awareness and articulateness, however, but it’s isolated, restricted to his shuttered room, cut off from the human turmoil in the hotel beyond. 

  Lamija is the manager’s devoted, efficient worker, until he fires her to punish her mother’s political engagement. When she returns to beg him to help find her he molests her. Her cries of “Don't, please don't” are heard by her admiring co-worker outside the door, an earnest suitor whose finances leave him living with his parents. Here he has a chance to save his lady fair but he retreats. The poor can’t afford to be noble — except that Lamija’s mother tries. If the governors feel no responsibility to their workers, the workers themselves have abandoned each other out of selfish concern. Practical, but selfish. 
     This action unfurls in a carefully graduated theatre. There is the idea of a Bosnian anniversary of the assassination, introduced by a TV interview, i.e., an event already mediated by a medium. Then there are those public events, including a session of international political figures, the Levy play production and the Frenchman’s speech. Then there is the hotel which will house the dignitaries but with a false appearance of stability and security. Then there is the workers’ suffering and revolt, churning away in the hotel’s labyrinthine wings, offstage. And at the most human level there are the stories of individual needs, desires, passions and failures, the dramas unseen in the political calculations but often key determinants of the history that sweeps over and away human lives.