If only Angelina Jolie’s latest directorial effort, Without Blood, could be as pointed and consequential as her words in real life. If only the film, about the human toll of war, could draw blood as she does.
Jolie, a film-maker and former UN ambassador, has long been an outspoken advocate and humanitarian. She was also one of the first and remains among the few Hollywood stars to speak up for Palestinian lives, criticizing the lack of humanitarian aid provided to innocent civilians.
She’s made films in the past about the Bosnian war (In the Land of Blood and Honey) and the Cambodian civil war (First They Killed My Father). But in Without Blood, she wrestles with Alessandro Baricco’s stubbornly vague novel about the lingering traumas from an unspecified conflict.
Baricco’s text, about a man and a woman linked across time by brutal act of violence, resists any association with identifiable conflicts. That’s its ploy for universality, a faux generous and frankly overrated gesture. Sure, it worked for Incendies, the film that Without Blood most resembles. But Incendies gained more notice for director Denis Villeneuve’s deft hand with narrative craftsmanship, atmosphere and tension than the story it was telling. And if the recent wave of more diverse storytellers has taught us anything, it’s that specificity helps anchor narratives in a human experience that feels authentic, and universal by default.
Without Blood instead leaves its mismatched stars, Salma Hayek Pinault and Demián Bichir, flailing with words, anecdotes and frustratingly tedious and abstract conversations that feel like they’re searching for meaning – beyond the obvious and didactic sentiment that war causes harm and solves nothing.
Hayek and Bichir (the latter faring slightly better with the hollow material) play Nina and Tito. We can only guess that they’re living in the mid-50s in Mexico, though that’s never stated. He’s the weary operator of a kiosk. She’s the mysterious woman exuding mischievous warmth. Nina flirtatiously insists Tito join her for a meal. He resists at first, before resigning himself to this fated confrontation with the woman he met as a child, when Tito was a young rebel with a hand in her family’s assassination.
The instigating scene is among the few affecting moments in Without Blood, because Jolie sits in the violence and lets its ugliness fester. The drawn-out standoff – where vengeful gunmen continue a cycle of violence while giving monologues that are too arch for the cast to deliver convincingly – is extremely western-flavoured. So is the virtuosic opening tracking shot when riders on horseback lasso a young man and drag him across the dirt. There’s a heaviness to the violence in these early moments, which the film struggles to sustain.
In the present, Nina and Tito take turns narrating their own stories to each other, with a sense that they know each other’s next move. And they occasionally lean on over-the-top gestures to land dramatic points. In one moment, Hayek slowly turns a porcelain cup 180 degrees by its handle as she underlines a revelation. She does so with such self-satisfaction it verges on parodic.
They unwrap the expansive narrative, where there are no clear-cut heroes or villains, mostly for the audience’s sake, detailing the cascading violence, sexual abuse, dehumanization and traumas since their last confrontation. Tito’s mostly haunted by what Nina has endured, the gender gap in how war is experienced, made explicit. Moments where Nina pegs Tito’s existence as a performance of normalcy, even when performing basic functions looking right to cross the street, transcend, even if the observation feels more written for the movies than life.
Without Blood trades in tropes, often knowingly. There’s the aforementioned western iconography along with touches from lavish spy thrillers or 50s melodramas. The film, like the novel, indulges in genre, maybe as a deconstruction of how these stories celebrate violence and heroism. Or maybe genre is just another refuge from the real world.
Jolie also lays it on thick stylistically, as if compensating for a hollowness at her lavish, sepia-toned film’s core. Without Blood is brimming with fussed-over images – from the sentimental slow-motion bits with golden light refracting against the lens, or the glistening wet cobble-stoned streets that Nina treads across in heels towards her mark.
Surprisingly, the film hits a powerful note in its final moment, where the ambiguity works in its favour. Jolie abandons the characters in a moment that’s both comforting and unsettling, where the sense of inevitability, which up to that moment dictated their lives, fades, and we have no clue what their intentions are and whether they know how to move forward.
Without Blood is screening at the Toronto film festival and will be released at a later date
