Movie Review: ‘A Perfect Day’

"A Perfect Day” is a new movie set during the last days of the Bosnian War stars Tim Robbins and Benicio Del Toro. Time Warner Cable News film critic Neil Rosen filed the following review.

Del Toro and Robbins are working in the Balkans in 1995, at the end of a conflict that saw the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian and Croatian Muslims by Serbian forces. The entire movie unfolds over a 24-hour period and their task for the day is to remove a dead body from a drinking well before it becomes contaminated, and the crazy trials and tribulations they encounter along the way.

Getting rid of a corpse sounds like it would be an easy job, but nothing is that simple in the war-torn Balkans. Their big obstacle is they have no rope to pull the body out. There are other problems too, like land mines all over the place making travel tough. In addition, whenever they do meet with a modicum of success, there are other types of roadblocks, specifically, United Nations red tape and bureaucracy that are thrown in their way.

As these characters become desensitized and unfazed by the horrors they've seen, writer/director Fernando Leon de Aranoa has his movie play out at times like a dark comedy, sort of in the style of "MASH." It's a good technique as sometimes humor is the only self survival weapon these well intentioned workers can turn to after they've been thwarted at almost every turn.

Del Toro and Robbins are letter perfect as two counter culture guys just trying to do their necessary but thankless job and dealing with the absurdities of war. Also on hand, and quite good, are Olga Kurylenko and Melanie Thierry.

By focusing on a small story, the sarcastically titled "A Perfect Day" becomes more relatable and in the process tells us more about the big picture, in this case the Bosnian conflict.