With “Without Blood,” her fifth feature as director, Angelina Jolie goes so far back into the womb that it could well be her first. This is not a critique, rather it is a reality that making films that depict the inhumanity of war during contemporary times, is a colossal challenge, no matter how popular the figure may be. There are many wars raging and the consequences of these conflicts are the migration of millions of people that are aggravating the threats posed by immigrants in most parts of the globe. Conceiving conflicts across Bosnia (2011, In the Land of Blood and Honey), Cambodia (2017, First they killed my father) and second world war (2014, Unbroken) was in itself a challenge, but attempting to construct a narrative based on Alessandro Baricco’s short story “Without Blood” that he wrote in 2002, is admirable. It is an ambitious two handed time piece that is abstract in nature and viewers are left believing that they have missed an opening scene or two. “What year is this? Where in the World are we?” Who Arguments these words?
This is the basic type of civil war that can sickeningly arise anywhere as in a sprawling preface shown here, the war is portrayed in a brutal wild west context, men on the backs of horses catch a man with lassos, pull him off the horse and through the ground. There is a greater goal, which is definitely hinted at as the narrating voice over from Bichir’s character, Tito, states, “We had our dream. We were doing it for a better life. We had to go down to the soil, and we did.”
Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven serves as quite an inspiration here, cut to a young girl, Nina, on a swing. This pastoral setting is spoiled by the arrival of a car, making the action more contemporary than one would have thought, and three men emerge. To garage “chooses” his daughter and hides her under the floor. The young Tito is one of them, at that time, together with his father Salinas and a man called El Blanco, and they are in search of Nina’s father, a former head doctor of a hospital, so punish him for having a shot for him.
He was, as they know him, a war criminal and to his associates “who chuckled when they mentioned it” he was “Hyena.” Is this so. We, and Nina, do not learn it, which is not a spoiler because the Orgruacth, the truth, is about to become the object of the struggle the film is centered around.
This sense of conflict does not go well resulting in a situation of fire which Nina manages to come out from. The plot then, if it can be so called, advances to a still unknown time this time probably to the late fifties or the early sixties. A Los Angeles. An urban city. There is Nina now Hayek who is older, it’s evident. recoiling Balzare’s general appearance, who used to be a fairly ordinary street news dealer. She is not in fact very bent on purchasing a lottery ticket, rather Tucker whispers to her. Bichir extends his feelings with great emphatic force. There is a reason you made the longer walk.’
This here is the crux of the film Without Blood where in a loving fashion they reminisce about their lives recounting the events that took place where in many cases one explains the other entirely and vice versa. Hence his statements about Nina are on the basis of people’s recollections that he sourced since this memorable date and Nina either runs with this particular narrative or turns it down.
Both actors keep a poker face throughout the film, and the film almost comes to a standstill which, if you are willing to indulge in, becomes rather an interesting fever dream Nina is an angel of revenge, a gun in her handbag and the guilt that ravenously gnawed at Tito for so many years lays her bare of a leg to stand on before Nagy.
Odd film, too, with an ending that does not provide a clear view answer to the questions, was she going to kill him. Or was she going to spare him. Why Jolie was interested in the material is probably because it is certainly not easy perspective to take but perhaps says something of why Jolie was attracted to the material. It’s an effort at least in trying to understand what might stop these cycles of violence that bring otherwise peaceful societies to war. Remembering the wars they both fought in, Nina states: “Revenge is the only drug that takes away the pain.” Perhaps in the world, at this moment, that is a little oversimplified, but it still remains correct, and not to forget the stupendous acting by Hayek and Bichir, Jolie created a very nice, although too theatrical, room play to show us all.
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