Grbavica is set in the eponymous Sarajevo neighborhood that was formerly a Serbian internment camp and now houses a large concentration of women who subsist on slim government handouts and bitter memories. The word grbavica also means "woman with a hump," an evocative image that Zbanic harnesses to symbolize the burden carried by Esma, a careworn, middle-aged single mother played with matter-of-fact directness by Mirjana Karanovic, a veteran star of the films of Bosnian director Emir Kusturica. Notwithstanding her sad brown eyes, the tone is far from lugubrious. We see Esma giggling at a local women's center, then roughhousing happily on her living-room floor with her twelve-year-old daughter, Sara (played by the enchanting sprite Luna Mijovic). At first the movie plays its cards close to its chest: When Sara playfully pins her mother's hands to the floor and she suddenly stiffens in pain and grows agitated, it seems as though we're in for a cancer weepy. In fact, there's a long-held secret, masked by a tacitly agreed-upon fiction about the identity of Sara's missing father, that gnaws away at this loving but scrappy mother-daughter intimacy, driving them both to the point of crisis.
While Sara ratchets up the risky behavior with a wild boy and a gun, Esma, in an effort to make extra money to finance her daughter's class trip, wears herself out in two jobs that hold up a mirror not just to her plight, but that of a society disfigured by its brutal wars. By day she works in a shoe factory, sustained by its all-female workforce united in common suffering. By night she serves drinks in a bar whose masculine sexual vibe, hitched to openly condoned violence, reduces her to a tangle of pain and rage.
Grbavica is neither formally nor intellectually a sophisticated work. Its politics come with a very small p, and Zbanic's youthful faith in the notion that the truth shall set you free verges on the reductive when applied to a country still reeling from the use of sex as a tool of political domination. At times her characters can barely breathe without giving voice to wider social conflicts. Straining plausibility, Esma strikes up a tentative romance with, of all things, a sensitive hit man. But Grbavica is a womanly movie in the best sense: Zbanic has a deeply feminine sense of how crisis gets filtered through the domesticity of daily life. She is no wuss, though: Before we hear the two final songs, a keening voice of despair followed by the hopeful trill of a bus full of schoolchildren going on vacation, there comes a shattering confession of maternal love and hatred, the legacy of a generation of women who, day after day, must carry their humps on their backs and shrug them off in the name of the future.
