Film Review: Boško Buha (1978)

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Boys like to play soldiers, whether with toy guns or gaming consoles, and because of that it is easy even for certain adults to see war as some kind of Boy’s Own Adventure. The reality is, however, quite different and much darker, especially in situations when children actually have to be real soldiers. This truth was accepted even by the cinema of Communist Yugoslavia, at least judging by Boško Buha, a 1978 biopic directed by Branko Bauer, arguably one of the saddest Partisan films ever made.

The film is dedicated to Boško Buha, a teenager from the village of Gradina in today’s Croatia whose exploits as a crack Partisan during the Second World War made him into one of the former country’s greatest heroes and icons of popular culture. The plot begins during the winter of 1941/42 when Partisan forces, after launching an uprising against Axis occupation in Serbia, are forced to retreat to mountainous and more guerrilla-friendly areas on the border of today’s Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Among them are a large number of children and teenagers tagging along, and Partisan commanders at first try to send them back to their families, but soon discover that some, like Boško Buha (played by Ivan Kojundžić), simply don’t have any family or home to return to. Reluctantly, they decide to keep them and even give them arms, but Puškar (played by Marko Nikolić), one of the Partisan company commanders, is given the specific task of keeping them out of trouble. Circumstances conspire against this plan and during a Partisan attack on an enemy garrison the boys actually take part in combat. Soon it turns out that Buha and his comrades, partly due to their short stature, possess great talent for sneaking towards enemy positions and neutralising bunkers with hand grenades. Buha takes part in many battles; his unit gets the nickname ‘Partisan Artillery’ and Buha himself gets personally commended by Partisan leader Tito and becomes some sort of mini-celebrity. But fate, like that of so many of his comrades, is unkind, and he won’t live to see the end of the war.

Croatian filmmaker Branko Bauer seemed like the best possible choice for making this film, mainly because some of his best works had dealt with children, and some – like the 1956 classic drama Don’t Look Back, My Son and the popular 1976 television series Salaš u Malom Ritu – dealt with children caught in the Second World War. In this particular case, Bauer had to walk a fine line between celebrating the protagonist as a hero and martyr according to official ideology and his own, more personal, views of war as nothing short of a terrible tragedy that deprived a generation of a happy childhood and youthful innocence. This approach is best seen in the way young Croatian actor Ivan Kojundžić (often mistaken for Slavko Štimac, star of Salaš u Malom Ritu, due to physical resemblance) plays Buha – he is a brave and competent soldier, but at the same time he is immature, plays pranks and gets into fights. All this happens while he, like his friends and adult superiors, is under constant threat from hunger, disease and a technologically superior enemy. The only moments of normalcy occur in scenes that take place in a Bosnian town liberated by Partisans, where Buha has his first romantic experiences with a local girl and even glimpses the peacetime world by visiting a cinema run by a photographer (brilliantly played by Sabrija Biser). This character also allows the film to present certain complexities of the wartime situation in a scene where Buha becomes infuriated after learning that he had provided services to Germans and their collaborators. In that scene and many others, Bauer ultimately opts for humanity and condemns violence. Bauer also, according to his own words, refused to shoot any scene in which Buha or any of his young comrades directly kill anyone.

Boško Buha manages to walk the fine line between hagiography and realistic war drama, but it is far from a perfect film. The main problem is its episodic nature, which at times makes the plot and certain characters confusing and almost incomprehensible to viewers who aren’t familiar with the Second World War in Yugoslavia. To those who are familiar with the subject, Boško Buha looks, despite its ideological limitations, like a rather accurate depiction of Buha’s and other young Partisans’ lives. This is not surprising considering that one of the film’s co-writers – Boško Matić – was Buha’s comrade and a child soldier himself. Bauer, however, is unable to prevent the film from occasionally drifting into overt sentimentality, and this is especially evident in the scene depicting Buha’s death, which is followed by a scene featuring a smiling Buha and his friends parading in slow motion accompanied by the song "Nek se sete" performed by Oliver Dragojević. On the other hand, Boško Buha features some fine acting – both by adult actors like Marko Nikolić and Milena Dapčević (who plays a character based on Saša Božović, a female doctor, famous post-war author and witness of Buha’s death) and by the child actors. Among the latter, Dragan Bjelogrić, who debuted in the role of Buha’s friend Sirogojno, is the best known and later became one of the greatest stars of Serbian cinema.

Boško Buha is not among the best-known and definitely not among the more popular Partisan films. The latter can be explained by the events that happened later and made its content seem in a different light. All the deaths, suffering and sacrifices made by the young protagonists became futile when another war erupted in this part of the world half a century later. A conflict that would, among other things, bring members of Buha’s family onto different sides, and some of them became its casualties. The lessons that Bauer tried to impart apparently weren’t learned, but we can still hope that the next generations will be a little bit wiser.

RATING: 7/10 (++)