I had some good reasons to choose to see ‘A Perfect Day‘. The director is Fernando León de Aranoa, who since 2015 has made some good and very good films, two of which I had seen and written about. The cast could be the envy of any Hollywood production, with Benicio Del Toro and Tim Robbins in the lead roles and Olga Kurylenko and Mélanie Thierry completing the cast. And yet it is a film produced and shot in Spain, even though the story takes place in the Balkans of the 1990s, at the end of the bloody civil war triggered by the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. The execution is far from perfect, but the film manages to be funny and original at many moments.
The heroes of the film are members of a team of an NGO that tries to provide sanitation assistance to the population affected by the Serbo-Bosnian conflict. The team consists of two men veterans of this type of activity, a young volunteer on her first mission and another female inspector, who also happens to be the ex-lover of one of the men. They are joined by a local translator and a ten-year-old boy looking for a soccer ball. To pull out of a well a corpse that is poisoning the water necessary for the inhabitants to survive, the team needs a rope, but this item is another strategic commodity in times of war when ropes can immobilize enemies, tie ferocious dogs or be used to hang those considered enemies, who may be yesterday’s former neighbors. Danger lurks at every turn and the roads are unsafe, with hazards ranging from points of control manned by trigger-happy armed forces to cattle carcasses that may be booby traps. In this atmosphere, the NGO team members share memories, relive romantic adventures and, above all, fight with the UN bureaucracy.
The story in this film is a good illustration of the saying that ‘hell is paved with good intentions’. Peacekeeping forces, European bureaucrats, the UN and NGOs prove incompetent and incapable of providing effective help, given that the regulations designed in the offices or headquarters of the commanders cannot be applied to a conflict in which history meets the absurd and the cruelty of people towards people. The hell in this film is also comical, humor being one of the resources for survival in conflict conditions. The question of whether such bloody conflicts can be reflected on screens from a satirical perspective has been answered positively since the 70s with MASH, then in the 90s with Benigni’s ‘La vita e bella’ and up to the movies by filmmakers from the former Yugoslavia such as Kusturica’s ‘Life is a Miracle’. Like the films cited, ‘A Perfect Day‘ respectfully approaches suffering, but tries to filter it and add a dose of hope and optimism through humor. Unfortunately, the script stops a bit on the surface. Benicio Del Toro and Tim Robbins create two believable characters, but I would have liked to know more about them: where the two men come from and what prompted them to get involved in such dangerous activities at a time when the wars in the Balkans were the exception in a world that seemed to be approaching the ‘end of history’. Even more disappointing are the characters of the two women, played by two beautiful actresses with wasted talent here. The film is engaging, charming and comical, but it also has substance only in the details – the search for the rope, the scenes with the woman carrying her cows among the trees, the confrontations with the military or civil bureaucracy. It is one of those cases in which the background is clearer than the foreground. At the end of the viewing, I was left with the feeling that I had seen a fairly good film, but which missed the opportunity to be memorable.