Vincent Harrington (Padraic Delaney, The Wind that Shakes the Barley), a young Irish lawyer at the Hague, has surmounted many obstacles and bureaucratic wrangles since he departed the Dutch city in quest of the former soldier, Nikola Radin (Bruno Ganz, Downfall). Radin, the General of the piece is now a doughty old military man who went to ground years ago.
Should he find him wherever he lurks in secret, Radin's testimony will, Harrington believes, secure the conviction of the alleged war criminal Miro Pantic (Refet Abazi) back in The Hague.
Now, having escaped his appointed drivers - yes, sly operators with a whiff of thuggery - Harrington has finally stumbled on General Radin who is hiding out with his daughter Ines (Natasha Petrovic) on an Adriatic island.
This, by the way, is the Bosnian conflict stripped of its nomenclature - I may have missed it but I do not believe there was one mention in Witness of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, nor the self-proclaimed Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Croat entities within Bosnia and Herzegovina, Republika Srpska and Herzeg-Bosnia. Nor any mention of Montenegro or Slovenia.
For their own reasons the producers appear to have been scrupulous in avoiding the reigniting of old wounds. Or otherwise they just want to keep it simple for anyone watching in South Bend, Indiana. Okay, these guys are speaking Serbo-Croat but where the hell am I, I found myself asking more than once as I watched.
Anyway, Delaney's Clark Kent-like lawyer wants to sell the grizzled old General the benefits of the Hague International Criminal Tribunal. "The Court has a really good family protection plan," he tells him, as they kind of grapple with each other on the side of a mountain. "They have a whole system in place," he says, like a guy door-stepping the old General.
He tells him that a comfortable house is guaranteed if he comes to the Hague. He may even have dangled the allure of a pension plan to the old soldier in his speedy sales talk (he doesn't mention an eventual sense of Wellness but it has to be in the package of goodies surely).
Problem is General Radin does not want to see anyone at all, so he is mighty riled by Harrington's appearance and twice asks for his gun. At this point, I was sure that if Harrington said any more about The Hague he was going to plug him one.
The General saw the baleful signs when the Bosnian War was about to break out following the break-up of the federal socialist republic of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. Thus he promptly left his high-ranking post in the Yugoslav Federal Army.
A man of few words,The General is an idealistic poet who prefers to hoard his sentences for his poems. An honourable individual, he left the army because he wanted nothing to do with power-hungry men jostling for power after Marshal Tito's demise.
The man has been living as a recluse in the decades since, described as deranged and therefore of no value to Harrington by the man who wants to keep the lawyer off his trail, the Deputy Minister for Justice, Batic (Gary Whelan.) So does Harrington get The General to do the needful and issue a testimony? There's many a slip between the cup and the lip, and a few manful glasses of slivovitz to be consumed for courage along the way.
The film features dialogue in both English and Serbo-Croat and was made with a cluster of European funding, from various bodies, including the Irish Film Board, finance from Switzerland - including, curiously the City of Geneva - and the Republic of Macedonia. Or indeed the Republic of North Macedonia, if you prefer - the name has, indeed, been controversial.
With the history deliberately toned down and the screenplay honed to earnest simplicities, you need to know practically nothing about the Bosnian conflict if you wish to engage with Witness, a reasonably engaging movie which features some very fine mountain scenery and beautifully-poised shots of the shimmering Adriatic Sea.
The producers though should have urged the screen-writers Mitko Panov, Wladyslaw Pasikowski and David Riker's to take more risks, or at least front-loaded it with more of the heft of history. That may not have been so easy given the sensitivities that still exist 23 years after the war ended in 1995, a handicap readily recognised by your reviewer.
Paddy Kehoe
Witness will be shown exclusively at Movies@Dundrum and Movies@Swords on Friday January 25
