Review: Take Me Somewhere Nice Is a Beacon of Hope for Bosnia’s Future

Ena Sendijarevic’s Take Me Somewhere Nice doesn’t take us anywhere of the sort, even if much of its major action transpires amid scenic south-Balkan landscapes. A road-trip comedy with a caustic sense of irony and a hard emotional shell, it looks askance at nice places, whether that means the comfortable bourgeois settings of wealthy Western Europe or the verdant cliffs of the Bosnian coast. Sendijarevic brings a specifically Balkan world-weariness to the classically American form of the road movie, a disaffection that suffuses both her characters and her compositions, but by film’s end, even the highways of the former Yugoslavia prove that they can facilitate a journey of self-discovery.

The film’s scenario echoes, to some extent, Jim Jarmusch Stranger than Paradise: A young woman visits her and his friend, and after some listless sitting around, the trio goes on a fruitless journey. Here, though, the young woman, Alma (Sara Luna Zoric), is the daughter of Bosnian immigrants living in Holland, and she’s returning to her home country to visit her ailing father. And her cousin, Emir (Ernad Prnjavorac), and his buddy, Denis (Lazar Dragojevic), aren’t your typical Jarmuschian hipster losers. Emir’s affectless bearing has a distinct severity, and more than a tinge of misogyny; at one point, he and Denis essentially kidnap Alma after she refuses a ride from them, for which the jaded young woman quickly forgives them.

Emir resents Alma because she and her mother fled Bosnia during the war and never returned. When Alma first arrives in Sarajevo, he’s pointedly callous, refusing to give her a ride to the remote hospital where her father lies dying, and leaving her to fend for herself in a city and country she doesn’t really know. Although Denis becomes, after a fashion, Alma’s romantic interest, it’s the development of Emir’s relation to her that speaks most to Take Me Somewhere Nice’s concerns with homeland and heritage. Late in Sendijarevic’s film, Alma accuses Emir of being a nationalist as their old-model car shambles over uneven rural roads. He insists he’s a patriot: “One is based on hatred, the other on love.”

Despite Emir’s excursus on the meaning of patriotism, love isn’t readily apparent in his actions, or in the world of the film. Estranged from her father since he returned to Bosnia at the turn of the millennium, Alma clearly doesn’t know how to feel about him or about the homeland with which the film symbolically aligns him. But between the drolly symmetric compositions and excessively neutral affects that comprise much of Take Me Somewhere Nice, Sendijarevic smuggles in moments that border on emotional authenticity. Midway through her cross-country trip to the hospital, Alma is distracted by the serene beauty of the surrounding mountains while at a rest stop—missing her bus and losing all of her luggage. The next night, stranded at a hotel and dependent on strangers’ charity, she stares up at a starry night sky unclouded by the urban glow of the urbanized, first-world Europe she knows best.

It’s not terribly surprising, then, when Take Me Somewhere Nice ends with a small, allegorical glimmer of hope for Bosnia’s future, even after cultivating a bitingly ironic tone and alluding to some of the nastier aspects of life in the nation—like the store of water barrels Alma needs for clean bathing water in Sarajevo, or the macho bruisers who jump Denis for unwittingly using their lawn chairs to lounge on the beach. From beneath the defensive layers of distanced comic despair that Sendijarevic has built emerges a sincere story about Alma’s emotional reconciliation with her alien, perpetually troubled place of origin.