For her fifth feature as director, Angelina Jolie has gone so far back to basics that Without Blood could quite easily be her debut. That isn’t a criticism, rather an observation about how hard it is, even for A-list talent, to make films about the brutality of war, even though many are raging all around us and, by displacing people in their thousands, feeding the anti-immigrant sentiment currently creeping up all around the world. But even after tackling conflicts in Bosnia (In the Land of Blood and Honey, 2011), Cambodia (First They Killed My Father, 2017), and even the Second World War (Unbroken, 2014), adapting Alessandro Baricco’s 2002 short story of the same name is a bold gambit; it’s a deliberately ambiguous two-hander that will have viewers wondering if they’ve missed a title card or two. What year is this? And where in the world are we?
The two stars are Salma Hayek Pinault and Demián Bichir, but if you’re expecting a historical story about either the Mexican or Spanish civil wars, the timelines won’t add up. It is simply a civil war, the kind than can (and has happened) anywhere, and in an extended introduction we see it play out in a vicious Wild West environment: men on horseback lasso a man, pull him from his horse and drag him through the fields. These men are on a mission, one alluded to by a reflective voice-over from Bichir’s character, Tito. “We had our dream,” he says. “We were doing it for a better life… We had to break up the earth — and we did.”
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Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven is a big influence here, and we see a young girl, Nina, sitting on a swing. Her rural idyll is disrupted when a car pulls up — making the drama more recent than we might have imagined — and three men get out. Her father makes a space for her under the floorboards and tells her teenage brother to go and hide. One of the three is the young Tito, there with his father Salinas and his muscle El Blanco, and they are there to dispense justice on Nina’s father, once a head physician at the local hospital. He was, they say, a war criminal, a man known as “Hyena” to his friends “who laughed when they said it.” Is this true? We, and Nina, never find out, which is not a spoiler since the truth is about to become the battleground the film is fought over.
This showdown does not go well, ending with a conflagration that Nina somehow survives. The action, if that’s the right word, then shifts to another non-specific timeframe (possibly the late ’50s, early ’60s) and another unplaceable location (this time a city). A chic, stylish woman — no prizes for guessing that it’s now Hayek as the older Nina — approaches a humble street news vendor, ostensibly to buy a lottery ticket. The man (Bichir) picks up on her undertone immediately. “I know who you are, and I know why you’ve come,” he says. “You’ve come here to find me. And now you have found me.”
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This is the essence of Without Blood, as the two sit down in a café to thrash out the essence of what happened in their lives, each one’s stories countering or sometimes furthering the other’s. Tito tells Nina the stories that he’s heard of her life since that day, and Nina either accepts or rejects it. As if in a poker game, their faces reveal nothing, and the film drifts into a kind of stasis that, if you choose to go with it, becomes a fascinating fever dream: Nina, the angel of vengeance with a pistol in her purse, and Tito without a leg to stand on as she picks at the guilt that’s been eating him for years.
It’s a strange film, culminating in an ending that rejects the objective, binary expectations that one might have: will she kill him or spare him? It’s by no means an easy alternative to buy, but it does perhaps explain why Jolie was drawn to the material; it’s an attempt, at least, to find ways to break the cycles of violence that keep otherwise civilized societies fighting. Referring to their shared experiences of war, Nina notes that “revenge is the only drug that eases the pain.” In the world, right now, that might be a little simplistic, but that doesn’t make it any less true, and — without forgetting to note the excellent performances by Hayek and Bichir — Jolie has made an artful, if stagey chamber piece to remind us of that fact.
Title: Without Blood
Festival: Toronto (Special Presentations)
Director: Angelina Jolie
Screenwriters: Angelina Jolie, Alessandro Baricco
Cast: Salma Hayek Pinault, Demián Bichir, Juan Minujin
Running time: 1 hr 31 mins