[D66] [JD: 133] ‘Quo Vadis, Aida?’ Review: Life and Death in Srebrenica | NYT

[R.O.]

nytimes.com
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/11/movies/quo-vadis-aida-review.html>


  ‘Quo Vadis, Aida?’ Review: Life and Death in Srebrenica

A.O. Scott
5-7 minutes
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Critic’s Pick

Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Oscar entry is the harrowing and rigorous story
of a U.N. translator’s fight to save her family from slaughter.

Jasna Djuricic is Aida, a high school teacher turned U.N. translator, in
Jasmila Zbanic’s “Quo Vadis, Aida?”
Credit...Super LTD

Published March 11, 2021Updated March 12, 2021

Quo Vadis, Aida?
    NYT Critic's Pick
    Directed by Jasmila Zbanic
    Drama, History, War
    1h 41m

In July 1995, the Bosnian Serb army, under the command of Gen. Ratko
Mladic, overran the town of Srebrenica
<https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/09/sunday-review/12SREBRENICA.html>,
which had been declared a safe haven by the United Nations. Muslim
civilians sought refuge at a nearby U.N. base, but were handed over to
Mladic’s soldiers, who separated them by gender and loaded them into
buses and trucks. Around 8,000 men and boys were murdered, their bodies
buried in mass graves, in one of the worst atrocitie
<https://www.nytimes.com/1995/10/29/world/massacre-in-bosnia-srebrenica-the-days-of-slaughter.html>s
of the wars that convulsed the former Yugoslavia for much of the decade.

At the time, many in the West wondered how this could happen — how
genocidal violence could erupt in Europe barely 50 years after the end
of World War II. “Quo Vadis, Aida?,” Jasmila Zbanic’s unsparing and
astonishing new film, shows precisely how. This isn’t the same as
explaining why, though Zbanic’s granular, hour-by-hour, lightly
fictionalized dramatization of the events leading up to the massacre
sheds some glancing light on that question.

Mladic (Boris Isakovic) is an unnervingly familiar figure. A
self-infatuated bully who travels everywhere with a cameraman, he
punctuates his displays of power with litanies of grievance. But the
movie isn’t really about him. He and his officers may be the authors of
the nightmare, but the viewer suffers through it in the company of Aida
Selmanagic (Jasna Duricic), who works as a translator for the U.N.

In her previous life, Aida was a teacher. Her husband, Nihad (Izudin
Bajrovic), was the principal of the local high school. At one especially
tense moment, she and a Serb soldier exchange polite greetings: he’s a
former student, who sends regards to Aida’s sons, Hamdija (Boris Ler)
and Sejo (Dino Bajrovic). That encounter is one of several reminders of
the prewar normal, when Serbs and Muslims lived side by side and Aida
and her family pursued an uneventful middle-class existence. A flashback
shows her participating in a whimsical pageant devoted to “Eastern
Bosnia’s best hairstyle.”

Now, she runs an increasingly desperate gantlet of contradictory
demands. Her U.N. identification badge affords her some protection,
which she tries to extend to her husband and children. She persuades
Nihad to volunteer as a civilian delegate alongside the U.N. commander
in farcical negotiations with Mladic, and uses her access to restricted
areas of the base to find hiding places for Sejo and Hamdija.

In her official capacity, Aida dutifully translates Serbian lies and
U.N. equivocations, a role that becomes both horrific and absurd. She
must convey to the panicked masses at the base — some of them her
friends and neighbors — reassurances that she knows to be false. Amid
the promises of safety, she can see clearly what is about to happen.

Duricic’s performance is somehow both charismatic and self-effacing.
Aida is tenacious and resourceful, and also terrified and overwhelmed by
circumstances. The story she is caught up in moves swiftly and
relentlessly, but sometimes nothing seems to move at all. The
victims-in-waiting are trapped. Their ostensible protectors are
paralyzed, and the predators are in no particular hurry. Who can stop them?

There is relentless, dread-fueled suspense here, and a kind of
procedural efficiency that reminds me of Paul Greengrass’s fact-based
films, like “Bloody Sunday”
<https://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/02/movies/film-festival-reviews-bloody-sunday-in-londonderry.html>
and “United 93.”
<https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/28/movies/defiance-under-fire-paul-greengrasss-harrowing-united-93.html>
The rigorous honesty of “Quo Vadis, Aida?” is harrowing, partly because
it subverts many of the expectations that quietly attach themselves to
movies about historical trauma. We often watch them not to be confronted
with the cruelty of history, but to be comforted with redemptive tales
of resistance, resilience and heroism.

Aida may have some of those qualities, but her brave attempts to escape
only emphasize how trapped she really is. The title asks where she is
going. The available answers are grim. If she can save herself, can she
also save her family? And if so, what about the thousands of others
whose lives are in peril?

Her situation is dramatized with exquisite empathy. Pity isn’t the only
emotion in play; it does battle with shame and disgust. The failure of
the U.N. is almost as appalling as Mladic’s viciousness. The rule-bound,
well-meaning Dutch officers in charge of the base become the general’s
hostages and then his accomplices. The massacre was a war crime
supervised by peacekeepers — a failure of institutional resolve, of
humanity, of civilization.

Eventually, Mladic was tried in The Hague and sentenced to life in
prison. The final act of “Quo Vadis, Aida,” Bosnia and Herzegovina’s
official Oscar entry, makes clear that many other perpetrators escaped
with impunity. The war ended, and some version of normalcy returned, but
Zbanic takes no consolation in the banal observation that life goes on.
It’s true that time passes, that memory fades, that history is a record
of mercy as well as of savagery. But it’s also true — as this
unforgettable film insists — that loss is permanent and unanswerable.

*Quo Vadis, Aida?*
Not rated. In Bosnian, English and Dutch, with subtitles. Running time:
1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters and on Laemmle’s Virtual Cinema
<https://superltd.com/films/quo-vadis-aida#virtual-cinema>. Please
consult the guidelines
<https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/daily-life-coping/personal-social-activities.html#event>
outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before
watching movies inside theaters.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.tuxtown.net/pipermail/d66/attachments/20210705/a315e695/attachment-0001.html>