STORM
Directed by Hans-Christian Schmid
Produced by Britta Knöller & Schmid
Written by Bernd Lange & Schmid
Released by Film Movement
English, German, Bosnian & Serbian with English subtitles
Germany/Denmark/The Netherlands. 105 min. Not Rated
With Kerry Fox, Anamaria Marinca & Stephen Dillane
 

Centered on a war crimes trial in The Hague, Hans Christian Schmid's Storm is not a documentary, but the film’s story—which swiftly captures the International Criminal Tribunal’s curious moral milieu and the bizarre landscape of contemporary European politics—approaches a verisimilitude so dazzling that it brought tears to my eyes. That is saying something: when was the last time you were outraged by a war crime in the Balkans? Radovan Karadzic, who turned up in Belgrade in 2008 after hiding for 12 years, generated headlines for one day, maybe two. (He was accused of killing thousands of civilians.)

The terrible anxiety, the pit in the stomach of this movie, does not come from a rehashing of dastardly deeds. Instead, it seeps out of the idea that the court—and others like it—serves a marginal purpose. We are forced to consider that it might hamper political progress, that it sometimes endangers the lives of the witnesses who testify, and doles out Lilliputian sentences for gargantuan offenses. Even the citizens who live in the countries where these crimes were committed are hostile to justice when it’s imported from the Netherlands.

Prosecutor Hannah Maynard (Kerry Fox) is tasked with closing a case against a Serbian general who’s accused of a variety of Milosevic-era atrocities. The general is probably guilty, but he doesn’t grimace, scream, or slither; he comes across as the genuinely, infuriatingly banal defendant whom we know all too well. Because of an unreliable witness, Hannah comes close to losing her case and must relaunch the investigation. After a series of intriguing twists, she meets Mira (Anamaria Marinca), a young Bosnian who’s now raising a family in Germany. Hannah convinces Mira to testify against the general, but her testimony is imperiled by menacing goons and, maybe more significantly, by judicial bureaucracy. Tension mounts. Difficult questions are posed, and ultimately left unanswered.

But Mr. Schmid’s deliberate, assured, and fluent filmmaking raises these wonky issues seamlessly while constructing a surprisingly compelling story. We get some of the passport-stamping action of a Jason Bourne flick and the courtroom hijinks of a John Grisham novel. But, more than anything, Storm is a carefully observed procedural that is bursting with respect for the tribunal, endlessly interested in how it functions, and unafraid of posing deep questions about its worth. Stephen Heyman
October 30, 2009