Last Waltz in Sarajevo

I have to say I am at an odds at how to rate this movie. On the one hand, it is a beautifully made and totally realistic a fresco of urban life in Sarajevo at the beginning of the 20th century. I can say this with some authority, as I was born there, knew a lot of people who actually lived in that period, and I was readily reminded of many of them, their character traits, in the characters of the movie. The attention to detail is excellent, the costumes, the outdoor and indoor scenes, right down to the various dialects and accents utilized by the actors, all spot on for the ethnic and social classes they portrayed. On the other hand, the storytelling is at times very confused, inconclusive and downright shallow. The allegorical approach of the director to telling his story is very often exaggerated, it gives me the feeling that he tried to make the movie 'artistic for the sake of being artistic...'

The story evolves around the events that brought to the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 that effectively initiated the first world war. Now, the happenings on the screen are confusing for me, and I know the history of this event very well. For someone who doesn't, this film is absolutely meaningless. It's a pity really, with some more time spent on the story itself, adding details to it and explaining the motivations of the actions of the protagonists better, this could have turned out to be a great film. Considering all of the above however, I cannot bring myself to rate it anything more than average.