Bosnia on the cheap
When photojournalist Harrison Lloyd (David Strathairn) disappears in Vukovar in the early days of the war in Bosnia, his wife, Sarah (Andie MacDowell), refuses to believe he's been killed. Insisting that she would know in her heart if he were dead--that "something inside me would have broken"--she sets out for Yugoslavia to find him.
The premise of Harrison's Flowers suggests a cross between a political thriller like Constantin Costa-Gavras's Missing and a pop romantic fantasy like the recent Dragonfly, in which a couple whose love burns with a pure flame can communicate across unimaginable distances. But the two genres don't mix, and the implausibility of Sarah's mission undermines the brutal realism that director Elie Chouraqui otherwise seeks to achieve.
MacDowell's character is nonsensical. She takes off for Yugoslavia apparently without any notion of what horrors she might encounter there. Considering that she's married to a Newsweek photographer whose war coverage won him the Pulitzer and that she too works at the newsmagazine, you'd think she might have acquired a little secondhand savvy about life in a war-torn nation. But it isn't until she lands in the middle of the fighting and is beaten and nearly raped by Serbian soldiers that reality dawns.
