A Perfect Day

This retro wartime dramedy, set somewhere in the Balkans (presumably Bosnia) in 1995, stars a grizzled, grey Tim Robbins and aging hipster Benicio Del Toro as roguish aid workers “B” and Mambrú, respectively, whose deceptively simple mission is to remove a corpse from a mountain village well so that the region's water supply isn't contaminated. But they are shamefully underequipped and therefore have to tool around the treacherous mountain roads in search of someone who might have a rope with which to extract the body. Spanish director Fernando Léon de Aranoa wastes no time in suggesting that this is a manly man's world: neophyte female assistant Sophie (Mélanie Thierry) does all of the complaining and worrying about on-the-job procedural matters, while B and Mambrú counter her altruistic nagging with dismissive knee-jerk skepticism. Meanwhile, de Aranoa cranks up an in-your-face hard-rock soundtrack that is so badly contextualized that even the Velvet Underground's brilliant “Venus in Furs” sounds grating and out of place. Scenes that one assumes will be intense—negotiating a hostile military checkpoint or a minefield—just fall flat, as Robbins's and Del Toro's performances don't exude cool collectedness so much as bored indifference. Finally, the staged ongoing conflict between the bureaucratic U.N. peacekeepers and the anarchist aid workers just feels too inconsequential to produce any real tension here. Optional. (M. Sandlin)