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90 MINUTES | MFA: AUGUST 26-28 + 31 + SEPTEMBER 3

Vinko Bresan’s 2003 film begins with a never-ending tracking shot incorporating all sorts of passing characters and concluding in murder, a cool homage to the similarly elongated "noir" opening shot of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil. After that, this Croatian feature turns flat and turgid, even as the filmmaker tries to liven things by telling and retelling his didactic story from different points of view. It’s 1992 in a small Croatian town, and the murdered guy is a Serb killed by a trio of anarchic Croat soldiers avenging the death on the battlefield of the father of one of the three. Should the local police arrest the assassins or, because this is war, allow them to return to the battlefield? Everyone in this leaden film walks around in pain, agonizing about the moral issues. But credit Bresan with going beyond "blame the Serbs" to ask questions about Croatian responsibility in Yugoslavia’s ethnic wars.