SYNOPSIS

Milena is a middle-aged wife and mother ensconced comfortably behind a gate in an upscale suburb of Belgrade. She quietly tends to her looks, dutifully cooks and entertains, and meets her friends for choir practice. She makes love with her husband and they socialize jauntily with a group of old friends. But unsettling realities are beginning to seep into Milena’s consciousness and disrupt her ordered world. One day while cleaning, she happens upon a videotape that incriminates her husband in horrific war crimes. A Good Wife is the story of how this secret reverberates in Milena’s life and eventually changes her.

Program Note

The list of countries involved in the
 making of this film is the first thing that catches our eye: Serbia, Bosnia,
 Croatia. Previously all united under the Social Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
 up until the 1990s, these countries have been split into Serbia,
 Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Croatia after the civil wars and national dissidence
 that lasted for about a decade. The history behind the division, independence,
 and dissolution of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was one inundated by
 heinous war crimes such as civilian massacres, rape and sexual coercion, ethnic
 cleansing, and the genocide of Muslims. The historical reckoning of these war
 crimes is still ongoing. The story of A Good Wife unfolds along two narrative
 axes. There is the narrative of the husband, who participated in the Bosnian
 War as part of a paramilitary unit and became a wartime criminal, as well as a
 second narrative that centers around his wife, a typical upper-middle class
 housewife who has recently been diagnosed with breast cancer and is awaiting
 surgery. These two narrative axes collide and conflict with each other when the
 housewife, Milena, discovers that her husband has committed war crimes and
 massacred civilians in the Bosnian War. 

The film juxtaposes the process of Milena
 initially denying, but eventually facing, the fear behind her cancer diagnosis
 with the progression of her initial denial of the fact that her husband is a
 war criminal to her eventually reporting his heinous crimes to a broadcast
 station. War crimes are similar to cancer cells in a human body - just as
 cancer can relapse if all of its cells are not completely removed, there is no
 forgiveness for a war criminal until he receives a punishment matching the
 gravity of his crimes.

The title phrase ‘a good wife’ signifies an
 ordinary housewife who peacefully runs the household, but also stands for the
 just and ‘ethically good wife’ who is courageous enough to bring charges to her
 war criminal husband and expose his crimes to society. [Sunah KIM]