One of the things I like about a challenge like this, moreso than when I went through the original AFI list, is not only do I expose myself to films I have never seen before, but I sometimes even get to check out a film I have never even heard of before. Case in point: the Bosnian war drama Quo Vadis, Aida? The translates to “Where Are You Going, Aida?” and there’s no way I would have checked that film out were it not for a challenge like this. That’s due mostly to the fact I can honestly say I never heard of it before. I certainly wasn’t expecting to find it on Hulu of all places either.
Fortunately, this time there weren’t so many English language commercials to interrupt the film. Those interruptions really didn’t help much with Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and Quo Vadis, Aida? actually has sections spoken in English, but the less interruptions, the better.
The film is about Aida Selmanagić (Jasna Đuričić), a middle-aged Bosnian schoolteacher working as a translator for a Dutch battalion trying to keep the peace in a safe zone on behalf of the UN even as the Serbs are cracking down on the area in an attempt to bring the land under their control. The Serbs, led by real world convicted war criminal General Ratko Mladić (Boris Isaković), are coming, and as much as the Dutch officers in charge assure Aida and the other Bosnians around her that there will be airstrikes and other forms of protection should the Serbs try anything, this film is based on a real life incident: the massacre of all the men over the age of 14 or so in the village of Srebenica. Anyone with even a little bit of knowledge about these times will know that the Dutch will be ultimately unsuccessful in their peacekeeping efforts.
That doesn’t matter much to Aida. She just wants to keep her husband Nihad (Izudin Bajrović) and two adult sons Hamdija (Boris Ler) and Sejo (Dino Bajrović) alive. Aida is not a soldier. She’s a schoolteacher. She isn’t about to go all Rambo on the Serbs, but then again, this isn’t that sort of film anyway.
Instead, the film is an indictment of a lot of the people involved in the massacre. The Serbs are the more blatantly awful. The first time the audience sees General Mladić, he’s posing for the TV cameras he brought with him as he brings down Serbian flags and seems to casually order the execution of any Bosnians who didn’t get out of Srebenica in time, including the mayor. His soldiers are looting the town, with a couple even stepping over a woman, dead after she’d obviously been shot, to get whatever was left behind in her home, one where toys and a small dog seem to indicate was once a happy family home.
But then there’s the Dutch, and if the Serbs are guilty of the sins of commission, then the Dutch (speaking in English for most of the film) are guilty of sins of omission. The UN base they head off to isn’t big enough to house all the fleeing Srebrenica villagers, they seem to keep assuming the Serbs will follows some pre-arranged rules when it is very obvious the Serbs are playing the Dutch for chumps, and even when Dutch soldiers see the Serbs blatantly taking men off for execution, they still don’t do anything. If you watched Nick Nolte’s UN officer in Hotel Rwanda and thought he was more than a little toothless thanks to the regulations that forbade him from firing his weapon at, oh, anybody, at least Nolte’s character was trying to bluff his way through keeping people alive. The Dutch here seem even more useless than the UN soldiers in Hotel Rwanada as a result.
That’s probably best exemplified in many scenes. The Dutch say they won’t let armed Serbs into their base, then let armed Serbs into the base. They assure the Bosnians that they don’t have to leave with the Serbs if they don’t want to, and then they end up letting that happen. They promise airstrikes that never come that might have been the fault of the French in real life, but the point stands. Serbian soldiers catcall the lone Dutch woman in uniform, and when one Serb swipes a Dutch soldier’s UN blue helmet, the Dutch soldier can only just stand there and watch. At one point, when a mother tries to sneak her teenage son past the Serbs by dressing him in drag, it’s a Dutch soldier who points out the deception. Yes, that man gets slapped around by his companions and called a collaborator, but again, there seems to be no better way to depict just how useless the Dutch and the UN were in this case.
Then again, the film is done in such a way to make it clear no matter what the Dutch or the UN say, the Serbs are making their own rules, and part of the reason they can maybe get away with it is by issuing threats of retaliation if anything happens to them. Since the UN probably didn’t allow the Dutch to fire back under the assumption that the Serbs would follow the rules, it can be almost understandable why the Dutch behave the way they do.
Almost.
Through it all though, there’s Aida just trying to keep her husband and sons alive. She comes up with multiple plans, first to get them into the base. She herself will be safe as she is working for the UN, but she can’t get similar protections for her family. Not all of them anyway. Her husband Nihad, thanks to Aida, is made a negotiator with the Serbs at one point, and he may be protected, but their sons won’t be, and the Dutch won’t even arrange to allow Nihad to replace one of his sons on the truck. Then again, Nihad actually believes Mladić when the general promises to let the people leave in peace if they so choose.
Aida isn’t that foolish. She knows what’s going on. She knows how feckless the Dutch are and how ruthless the Serbs are. She’s in a constant rush to prevent an inevitability. None of the men of her village, including Nihad and their sons, will be getting out of this alive. The Serbs claim they are looking for “war criminals” which they define as anybody who ever shot at them in a war zone, and they have since decided that any man old enough to hold a rifle, despite youth or old age, fits that bill. The film’s final scenes of the men are incredibly effective as they are led into a room and then shot by machine gun fire as young boys play soccer outside. At no point in the film does it ever show bullets hitting bodies. All the violence takes place off-screen, but that doesn’t make what happened any less tense leading up to the gunshots or stark afterwards.
And yet, that’s not the end. The last twenty or so minutes, set at a point after the war is over, shows Aida returning to her former home, and the young mother in there is easily the only person in the entire film who seems to show Aida any real consideration in that she not only saved all of the personal belongings Aida and her family left behind, but when Aida basically told her to move out as Aida wants to live in her former home, the young mother barely raises an objection, asking only if Aida thinks it is safe enough for her to return. The answer is an obvious yes, but the real problem here is Aida sees one of the chief Serbs responsible for her family’s death is now a neighbor in her apartment complex. He’s older, and it looks like there really isn’t anything that Aida can do about it. Sure, Mladić may have been convicted of war crimes, but the brutal men under him appear to have largely gotten away with their actions during that time. How can Aida live with something like that?
The film doesn’t really say. It only says she has to.
NEXT: From a European film about a fictionalized account of a real life incident in a war zone to a Russian one, next up is what is considered one of the greatest films of all time, Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 silent film about a mutiny on a naval vessel during the Russian Revolution, Battleship Potemkin.
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