Jasmila Žbanić (2020)
The writer-director Jasmila Žbanić dedicates Quo Vadis, Aida? to the 8,372 victims of the Srebrenica massacre and those they left behind. Most of her hundred-minute film dramatises events just before the Bosnian Serb army’s genocide of Bosniak Muslim men and boys, which is the climax to the picture. Early on, gunfire in the town kills a woman outside her home; Žbanić momentarily shows the corpse and, beside it, the food the woman was preparing still cooking on a hotplate. These shots are untypical: one of the many striking features of Quo Vadis, Aida?, despite the casualty figures in Srebrenica and the lethal threat that pervades the film’s narrative, is how few dead bodies appear on camera. That seems to reflect more than discretion on the film-maker’s part. It’s as if Žbanić withholds the visual evidence of carnage as a way of suggesting that the magnitude of some horrors is beyond apprehension.
That’s not to say she doesn’t create images that are shocking in their atrocity. When the Bosniak males are eventually herded into a building, the camera moves up to near the ceiling; machine guns nose through small partitions there to open fire on the crowd below. (Žbanić quickly cuts to the street outside, where kids scarper as the shooting starts.) In the film’s epilogue, some years into the future, women walk round a large indoor area – it could even be where the killings took place – in which exhumed remains are displayed with a view to identification: skulls and bones, fragments of clothing, pairs of shoes. It’s a terrible spectacle – a vast, macabre lost property office. The sequence is wordless but not quite silent. Every so often, a wail is heard as someone out of shot recognises a loved one.
The title character, Aida Selmanagić (Jasna Đuričić), is a school teacher, now working as an interpreter for the United Nations. Aida is in nearly perpetual motion, mental and physical. On the rare occasions she’s sitting down, she’s always thinking – translating at a fraught meeting of the Dutch UN protection force and Srebrenica’s mayor (Ermin Bravo), or deciding her next step in trying to protect her husband Nihad (Izudin Bajrović) and their two adult sons, Hamdija (Boris Ler) and Sejo (Dino Bajrović). Much of Aida’s energies is devoted to trying to shield her family. Žbanić pulls no punches in showing her heroine – an authentic heroine – doing her utmost to exploit her UN position to that end. At the same time, Aida conscientiously translates for the crowd of refugees, which includes her friends and neighbours, the script she’s given by Serbian forces and UN personnel. Her repetition of the words serves to emphasise their falsity or hollowness.
It’s not unusual for reactions to dramas dealing with grave themes to be automatically respectful, the subject matter eclipsing the matter of how it’s been handled: bringing the material to the screen is all that counts. But with a film that describes actual momentous events, there’s also the possibility that its dramatic qualities, for similar reasons, may be under-appreciated. Despite the critical praise, that may have happened in this case: it’s hard to explain how Oscar (and BAFTA) voters could have judged superior Thomas Vinterberg’s mostly fatuous Another Round unless they felt Quo Vadis, Aida? was a quasi-documentary reconstruction rather than a fully-fledged drama. Jasmila Žbanić’s handling of the massed ranks of Srebrenica citizens outside or within the UN shelter is much more than a logistical feat, though. She doesn’t opt, as film-makers faced with a similar challenge have often opted, for singling out a handful of representative ‘characters’ and leaving the bulk of the extras undifferentiated. Thanks to the cinematographer Christine Maier’s brilliant lighting, each face in the crowd here is clearly defined, made individual.
Žbanić makes fun of Ratko Mladić (Boris Isaković) without making light of him. The leader of the Serbian forces is laughably vain (an army cameraman is on hand to record his every move and pronouncement). At the negotiating table, however, the Dutch UN contingent is no match for the blithely thuggish Mladić and his henchmen. As the commanding UN officer Thom Karremans, Johan Heldenbergh wears a moustache droopier than his real-life counterpart’s (according to the photo of Karremans on his Wikipedia entry), and which announces his impotence. The ineffectuality of Karremans’s deputy Rob Franken is more startling, thanks to Raymond Thiry’s keen-eyed, imposing presence in the role.
The townspeople are allowed to nominate three of their number as ‘negotiators’. With only two names forthcoming, Aida persuades Franken to let Nihad, former head of a secondary school in Srebrenica, join the other two. It’s stipulated that one of the trio must be a woman, and she is Charmila (Jelena Kordic Keret), who has – or had – a job in the financial sector. On arrival at the venue where the meeting with the Serbian forces and the UN will take place, Charmila is subjected to a much more protracted body search than either of her colleagues. The film conveys succinctly how misogyny leaves Bosniak females worse and better off than males. The women are scorned and humiliated; it’s not worth the trouble of murdering them.
At the start, the camera’s focus travels deliberately, from right to left, to show the four members of the Selmanagić family sitting together at home. From this, Žbanić moves straight into the crisis of July 1995 and the action is nearly unrelenting. Until the final leap forward to the years-later aftermath, there’s a single, well-judged interruption to the propulsive, linear storytelling – a flashback to a party where Aida and near contemporaries are taking part in a kind of comical, middle-aged beauty contest. In the conclusion to this sequence, a succession of people dancing at the gathering stop to gaze into the camera – we recognise faces already seen in very different circumstances, in negotiations or as refugees. Earlier on at the party, one of Aida’s students humorously calls out, ‘Bravo, teacher!’ to her. He’ll soon reappear as a member of the Bosnian Serb army.
Žbanić uses a similar technique in the epilogue that occupies the last ten minutes or so of screen time and which sees Aida return to Srebrenica. Her resourceful attempts to save her menfolk were finally unavailing. Nihad, Hamdija and Sejo all died in the massacre. Aida is among the women looking to identify remains (and succeeding). Before that, she visits what used to be the Selmanagićs’ home, where the new tenant (Edita Malovcic) hands over a collection of photographs of Aida’s family left in the apartment and introduces her little boy. It’s a well-acted scene (like all others in this film) but its poignancy is almost upstaged by the sting in the tail supplied by the man Aida notices on the stairs on her way out. This is Joka (Emir Hadžihafizbegović), the most menacing of the soldiers she encountered in the UN compound and now a resident of the same apartment block. In the film’s closing scene, Joka and his wife are seen again, watching a children’s concert at the school where Aida has returned to work. The spectators also include Charmila and others familiar from the main narrative. The routine being performed on the stage involves hand movements whereby the kids alternate between looking at the adults in the audience and shielding their eyes. Aida sits in the background and smiles at the performance, not without effort.
20 May 2021
