The Future Needs A big Kiss—By PJ

Gif from U2: Popmart Live From Mexico City.

The Future Needs A Big Kiss

PJ DeGenaro

I’m not a practiced film critic or reviewer, so this isn’t really a review. I’m just a lifelong U2 fan who keeps a watchful eye on current events. 

This Wednesday evening, I had the good fortune to see a preview of Kiss The Future, a documentary about the Siege of Sarajevo that culminates with U2’s concert in the newly liberated city. Only two other people were with me in the plush Dolby theater. I felt safe and comfy in my reclining seat, with the middle armrest lifted so I could curl up sideways like I do on my couch at home. 

That sense of safety and comfort did not last long.

I believe everyone who sees this film will find themselves trying to graft the Siege of Sarajevo onto current conflicts. It’s almost impossible not to, as the film opens with scenes of tanks rolling inexorably over the city while contemporary-looking people clutch plastic grocery bags and dodge sniper fire. These people are prisoners in their own home, trapped by their own army, walled in by nightmarish barricades made of crushed, twisted cars.

The sound of exploding shells and automatic rifle fire is viscerally jarring in Dolby, and it’s probably not much fun in “regular” either. So you almost can’t help but place yourself in Kyiv or Gaza. But these current conflicts are not really analogous to each other, nor are they analogous to Sarajevo. You can’t smooth out one conflict like a cloth napkin and wrap it around another. It will be too small and leave jagged edges exposed, or else be too large, swallowing the other conflict whole.

So you realize that all you can do is feel for anyone who is living in such a situation on a on a very basic human, mammalian level, and hope that they, like the Sarajevans of the 1990s, have an innate inner light that keeps them from succumbing to the darkness.

Kiss The Future is a great film, but it is not a perfect one. Directed by Nenad Cicin-Sain with a screenplay by Bill Carter (based on his memoir Fools Rush In), it follows a group of musicians, artists, and activists who survived the siege by creating an irreverent, kinetic underground community, replete with discos, concerts and art exhibits held in basements and bomb shelters. 

What makes the film less than perfect is that it sidesteps context about the country once known as Yugoslavia. A slightly longer nod to the centuries-old history of ethnic and religious tension in the region might have placed us on firmer footing and made the existence of Sarajevo – the beautiful capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina – even more striking as a paragon of a modern, diverse, culturally vibrant city.

To fill some gaps: In the 1980s, amid growing nationalistic fervor in the republics that once formed Yugoslavia, Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević took over the army and ordered the siege of Sarajevo in an attempt to ethnically cleanse it of Bosnians, Muslims and anyone who wasn’t Serbian. Sarajevo didn’t have its own military or armed “freedom fighters.” It was quickly surrounded on all sides by the army that was supposed to protect it. 

What makes the film great are the interviews with Sarajevans who were at the heart of the underground arts movement, and who were young, as I was, in the 1990s: 

A sharp, tough-minded woman named Alma Catal, who was part of a teenage gang that ran fearlessly through the city. 

Musicians Enez Zlatar and Gino Jevdevic, whose commitment to punk rock was crucial to their survival. (“If someone told you that you had five minutes to live,” says Jevdevic, “you’re going to do what you love the most.”) 

Vesna Andree Zaimovic – an indomitable woman who looks like a tall Marilyn Monroe – and her husband, Senad, both of whom worked for the local television station and used their know-how to provide the city with trenchant, rebellious entertainment.

U2 fans will surely have seen the video for “Miss Sarajevo,” featuring the most ironic beauty pageant ever to take place, which Bono called a massive “fuck you” to the authoritarians. Even more compelling – even more of a “fuck you,” I think – was Vesna and Senad’s wedding, held in a restaurant on a bombed-out street and preserved on video. I was moved by the naked joy on the faces of the guests, especially the young woman who caught Vesna’s bouquet as petals rained down into her hair. We have all just come through a pandemic, and we know what people look like when they finally experience a moment of normalcy.

U2 fans will also know that Bill Carter, an oddly boyish steamroller of an activist, managed to grab the attention of our band during their ZooTV tour in the hopes of helping the world maintain its spotty focus on Sarajevo.

In one fascinating scene, Carter is let into the inner Zoo sanctum for an audience with Bono, who is already dug into his fidgety, slightly obnoxious Fly persona – leather, shades, freshly sculpted hair. But as the two talk, a transformation takes place, and I found myself looking at an early version of the profoundly focused, deeply empathetic Bono we’ve come to know in recent years. Maybe it was just good editing, but as we’re all fans here, let’s assume it was Bono: trickster, shapeshifter, and a nice bunch of guys.

A montage of Bono’s mid-concert satellite interactions with the young people of Sarajevo begins with hope but darkens quickly, and his discomfort when a young woman tells him these conversations are basically a gimmick is painful to witness.

Bono promises Carter that U2 will play in Sarajevo one day. And he keeps his word, bringing the entire Popmart juggernaut to the city after its liberation. Again, we see the people striving for normalcy: They line up along the roads into the city and cheer the arrival of U2’s trucks and buses as if the band members are their liberators. Which, in a way, they are. 

I hadn’t realized there was so much footage of this show, and I want to give a shout-out to Bono’s shades for being the powerful totem that they are. On his way into the stadium, with his eyes covered, Bono walks along jauntily. He could be arriving at a gig in Sheffield or New Jersey.

But when he takes the stage in front of this audience, his shorn head and thin Popmart-era physique make him look small and vulnerable. These people have been waiting for so long, and have been through the unimaginable. Bono is overwhelmed, and his voice seizes up. But he carries on as only he can. “Sing for me,” he rasps, and the survivors sing for him. The camera pans the rapturous crowd. Bono throws back his head, grinning but also crying. It is all moving beyond anything I can describe.

If you see this film for no other reason, please see it for the concert. Because when we fans get together and talk about our favorite U2 shows – the ones that transported us, transformed us, and led us out of whatever personal darkness we were feeling into the bright light of what Bono calls defiant joy – we are describing only a fraction of what the Sarajevan audience was feeling, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with all their differences, one but not the same.

I was already sobbing pretty convulsively when the screen split. On the left, U2 and the audience. On the right, closeups of the older, wiser, beautifully etched faces of Alma, Enez, Gino, Vesna and Senad, as they watch the concert from almost 30 years into the future. Each was filmed separately, and each ends up weeping.

It is…a lot.

***

A few notes in closing:

I forgot to mention the interview snippets with Bono, Edge and Adam! It is of course a pleasure to see and hear from them.

It’s important to note that the Siege of Sarajevo took place within a wider regional conflict that raged throughout the early 90’s, with war crimes being committed by all sides. Wikipedia has a “List of Massacres in the Bosnian War” that will break your heart. 

But if I must leave you with a takeaway, it’s this:

Early in the film, British-Iranian journalist Christiane Amanpour, who covered the Bosnian war, calls Milošević’s slick, pre-internet propaganda machine her first experience of “fake news.” We are asked to imagine a president of the United States using the U.S. military to surround and besiege New York City. This scenario might have been hard to imagine just a few years ago, but it should serve as a warning against complacency now. 

Please take a look at that link. It’s very real, and you should be worried about it.