A Perfect Day (2015)

A PERFECT DAY  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Fernando León de Aranoa
    Benicio Del Toro, Tim Robbins, Mélanie Thierry,
    Olga Kurylenko, Fedja Stukan, Eldar Residovic,
    Sergi López, Frank Feys, Nenad Vukelic
A gallows comedy about some aid workers trying to get a dead body out of a well somewhere in Bosnia during the Balkan War. Imagine: a war movie in which no shots are fired and nothing explodes. Not that there isn't a war going on. You can feel it all around. Benicio Del Toro plays the team's head of security (such as it is), a week away from the end of his hitch and a plane ticket home. Mélanie Thierry's the newcomer, a water sanitation specialist getting her first look at life on the ground in a war zone. Tim Robbins plays the old-timer, a career ex-pat who's been at this so long, he's got no home to go back to anywhere. Olga Kurylenko's an NGO official who could pull the plug on the group's funding and shares an uneasy romantic history with Del Toro. De Aranoa spends enough time hanging out with these characters to let you get to know them a little, enough to give you a sense of the idealism that brought them to this hellhole in the first place, and the fatalism that gets them through the day. The movie's both funny and tense. The stakes are believably human. What's a perfect day, anyway? In this case, maybe it's a day you score enough rope somewhere to pull a corpse out of a well. Or retrieve a kid's soccer ball from a bombed-out house. Or successfully guess which side of the road you're driving on is mined. Or maybe it's just waking up the next morning to find you're still alive. You're hungry and dirty and you've hardly slept and you're on your way to a refugee camp with a failing sewer system and you're expected to do something about that, if you can just negotiate the roadblocks and the IEDs and the bureaucratic red tape and the rival armies and maybe a dead cow or two, and you're in Bosnia in 1995 and now it's raining. See? A perfect day.