La Voix d'Aida

The Bosnian entry for the Best International Feature Academy Award, "Quo Vadis, Aida?" is better than the odds-on favorite to actually win the Oscar, "Druk" (a.ka. "Another Round," 2020), being that it's actually about something that matters and is emotionally devastating--so much so that the eponymous Aida literally begs to make a Sophie's Choice at one point. The protagonists in both are teachers, and neither one ultimately affects any real change, but one is living history while the other rambles to high-schoolers about his famous favorite fellow drunkards. Both pictures are alienating: this one forcing us to witness the horrific Srebrenica massacre that we're unable to alter, and the other makes one feel like the designated driver to a bunch of binge-drinking dolts whining about their so-called mid-life crises. As opposed to waiting impatiently to drive the inebriated teachers home, however, "Quo Vadis, Aida?" does well to pull the spectator into the chaos. There's nary a dull moment in following Aida (as played rivetingly well by Jasna Duricic--seriously, Academy, you missed a nominee) around a makeshift UN refugee camp as she frantically tries to save the lives of her husband and two sons from the approaching slaughter by Ratko Mladic's Bosnian Serb Army and as the United Nations and their so-called, shorts-wearing peace keepers impotently stand by and refuse to help.

I want to note, too, that Aida being a translator, or interpreter, as the case may be (that "piano player" as "messenger" part early on, e.g.), makes for an interesting dynamic in the subtitling of the picture, among other things--much of it disregarded as unnecessary because of it. There's actually a good deal of English here beside other languages. Another good reason for the Oscar category name change from "Foreign Language Film" to "International Feature."

Additionally, amid all that, writer-director Jasmila Zbanic and company also do something reflexively interesting cinematically. While the real war is nothing more than a one-sided genocide slaughtering Bosniak Muslim males, there's another battle here for the cinematic control of the narrative. On one side, there's Mladic with the cameraman he continually tells what to shoot, and who in return reassures the would-be convicted war criminal that he'll fix his inane monotony with montage. We never see that film here, though--only its making from the outside, where its propagandistic lies are all the more apparent. And, on the other side, we have the faces of the people in the outer, film proper that is "Quo Vadis, Aida?" We see this in intermittent series of return gazes--of people looking directly, or close to, at the camera and, thus, us, the audience. They're the victims of the genocide within the narrative and, as the case may be, interpreting the real tragedy onto the screen, but through these return gazes, seize control of the narrative. This is their movie.