Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams is an altogether tougher piece of work. At times, it almost put me in mind of Fassbinder with its story of stolid, wary Esma (Mirjana Karanovic), a middle-aged single mother in Sarajevo, who is working desperately to raise 200 euros for her lying, ungrateful brat of a teenage daughter, Sara (Luna Mijovic).

In Sara's defense, I should mention that she has grown up in harsh circumstances. She begins a flirtation with a boy by kicking garbage at him down a snowy alley, improves the relationship during school hours spent in the shell of a bombed-out building (his hideaway) and ultimately secures the loan of his handgun as a pledge of love. You might think Esma would be aware of some of this, but she's oblivious, either through an act of will or else because she's so tired from working nights at her new job in a gangster bar, serving beer while the air throbs with turbo-folk music and the other hostesses bump and grind.

Esma's got her bad boy, too: a bodyguard bouncer in the bar (Leon Lucev) to whom she unexpectedly, tentatively begins to warm. He'd studied economics once, before the war, and Esma finds she can share things with him, such as stories about going to postmortem identifications. Too bad that Sara can't be willfully oblivious. As Esma gets closer to her new friend, Sara becomes that much nastier.

Jasmila Zbanic directs most of this material--including the revelation of Esma's terrible past--with admirable brusqueness. When she wants an expressive effect, she often has the good sense to subtract instead of add. (Witness an extended scene where Esma comes begging in a shoe factory, and the dialogue falls away beneath the pounding of the machines.) Your attention is directed straight to the actors' faces--which is where you should be looking whenever Karanovic's liquid eyes are opened before you.

Yet Zbanic can't resist putting in her own little touches of art. She sets the tone for Grbavica with a self-consciously poetic opening shot, panning through a silent room across the massed faces of women, each apparently lost in her own reverie. The scene is a women's center in Sarajevo, to which Zbanic returns more than once. I don't mind being there when one of the women is pouring out her story, while another responds with a laughing fit; but when everyone just sits there, patiently listening to a mournful song, I want Sara to storm in and tell them to get stuffed.

This directorial posturing isn't incidental to Grbavica. It's essential, as the early warning of a soft and tuneful conclusion. Fassbinder would have sneered. I sighed, a little. But then, recognizing that Zbanic had flattered only her characters and not me, I decided this young filmmaker might be allowed room to grow, despite her awards.

Grbavica begins its well-deserved US theatrical release on February 16 with a run in New York City at Film Forum.

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