The blood of a murdered child drips onto the heel of their younger sibling, staining their skin as well as their soul. It’s a resonant, albeit heavy-handed image that defines the thematic foundation of Angelina Jolie’s fifth narrative feature “Without Blood.” Based on Italian writer Alessandro Baricco’s book of the same name, the film follows a lengthy conversation between a man and a woman whose violent pasts are intertwined. As a young girl, Nina overheard three vigilantes murder her father and older brother while she hid beneath the floorboards of a country farmhouse. It was wartime — or maybe the war was technically over, but it continued to rage in the hearts of men — and the assassins sought revenge against Nina’s father, a doctor who may or may not have conducted medical experiments on patients. Years later, an older Nina (Salma Hayek Pinault) finds the sole living killer, Tito (Demián Bichir), and the two have a drink to discuss old times.
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As a humanitarian and a filmmaker, Angelina Jolie doesn’t shield her eyes from the horrors of the world. Her four previous narrative films all examine how war defines and circumscribes the choices people make to survive. (Her 2015 romantic drama “By the Sea,” starring Jolie and her ex-husband Brad Pitt, might seem like an outlier in this regard, though it obviously explores battles within the home.) “Without Blood” is no exception, but while Jolie’s other films are set during a specific conflict — the Bosnian War, World War II, the Cambodian genocide — her latest chronicles the lingering aftermath of a pointedly unidentified military campaign. Neither country nor ideology is specifically delineated. All that remains are emotionally-clouded memories from a time when bloodshed was of paramount importance.
Jolie’s adaptation remains quite faithful to Baricco’s story, which likewise refuses to identify a particular conflict. This type of abstraction works well on the page because readers can fill in the blanks using their imagination, but as much as Jolie strives to visually animate the parable in question, it simply fails to garner much purchase on screen. Film demands specificity, and “Without Blood,” which was shot in Italy and features actors of Spanish origin, can’t help but feel constantly confused. Jolie tries to compensate for the source material’s vagueness by mixing Western and noir imagery to create a hazy, cinematically-inspired space where capital-I Ideas about revenge and justice can thrive, but its fundamentally imitative textures undercut their potency at every turn.
With that said, the ideas in question are almost dead on arrival anyway because of the film’s dramatically inert structure. Like its source material, “Without Blood” opens on the murder of Nina’s family before depicting a lengthy conversation between an older Nina and Tito. Both Hayek Pinault and Bichir can obviously hold an audience’s attention through body language alone, never mind delivering dialogue, yet Jolie keeps interrupting their discussion with flashbacks that illustrate their recollections. It’s broadly understandable why she makes this choice, but thus the two-hander never gains sufficient conversational momentum and renders it difficult for viewers to lock into the characters’ emotional bandwidth. It also doesn’t help matters that the flashbacks themselves are visually underwhelming, not just because they’re fuzzy and indistinct by design, but also because their earthy photography too closely resembles the tobacco filter often used to characterize Mexico on screen.
As a result, “Without Blood” sort of resembles a less-assured “My Dinner With Andre” if it were about war crimes instead of experimental theater. Nina relates the tragic events of her life after she was orphaned: she was adopted by a creepy chemist, who eventually gambles her away in a card game to an equally creepy count who marries her when she was just 14. After bearing three children, the count dies in a car accident, but his family stops Nina from inheriting his enormous wealth by declaring her legally insane. Tito remembers things differently (the count was supposed to kill Nina to eliminate all evidence of the assassination; instead, he fell in love), but Jolie stresses that both of their memories were impacted by trauma. Truth has been permanently distorted and fractured by war, of which both Nina and Tito are victims.
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Jolie frequently characterizes small performance gestures from Hayek Pinault, like the ashing of a cigarette or stirring a cup of tea, as Proustian triggers, amplifying them in the photography and on the soundtrack. These ham-fisted stabs at sensorial stimulation are reflective of the film’s elementary nature and its simple themes. Both Hayek Pinault and Bichir imbue their dialogue with grounded, yet theatrical emotion, but their characters’ respective viewpoints feel so generalized that they become formless. Tito believes the people he killed during the war were justified because he was fighting for a better world; Nina argues that violence only begets violence and that the world is no better off after all that blood has been spilled. Without political, regional, or philosophical specifics, the conversation devolves into “war is bad” territory fairly quickly.
When “Without Blood” eventually reaches its predictable, trite emotional climax, the film’s irrelevance becomes impossible to ignore. Jolie’s disarming earnestness can be effective when she’s working behind the camera, especially because her passion for confronting injustice never once feels feigned. But that honest drive can’t compensate for a film’s lack of dramatic shape, which, in this case, strands two insistent performances clumsily posing as subtle and mature. The sincerity of “Without Blood” can’t be denied, but alas, the road to mediocrity is paved with good intentions.
Grade: C
“Without Blood” world premiered at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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