“Quo Vadis, Aida?” (M) ****

I WENT back seven decades to remind myself about the great 1951 media kerfuffle that accompanied Robert Taylor and Deborah Kerr in “Quo Vadis?” (Where are you going?) Mervyn LeRroy’s multi-Oscar winning sword-and-sandal flick in which a Roman general questions despotic emperor Nero’s tyrannical leadership and becomes infatuated with a beautiful Christian hostage.

A potboiler if ever there was one. 

On July 11, 1995, in what history now calls the Srebrenica massacre, Dutch UN peacekeepers opened the way for Serbian Chetnik killers to murder 8321 Bosniak Muslim boys and men whose only crime was their religious affiliation. 

When I was preparing to watch Bosnia/Herzegovinian writer/director Jasmila Zbanic’s film about that day and that event, I searched my mind for a connection, if any, between it and Leroy’s film. A connection is there. And seeing it develop on the screen as the prelude to the massacre wore on, I felt an increasing foreboding. 

I knew how it would end. I couldn’t foresee, as the film introduced Jasna Djuricic playing Aida, a high-school languages teacher and interpreter with the UN contingent confronting Ratko Mladic’s Serb force, how I would need mentally to shake myself out of the horror that was growing to dominate my sensibilities.

The film is about Aida trying to find logic in a situation that has little of it for her to work with. Much of it focuses on her face, behind which maternal courage suppresses an incandescent fury.

The climax, however well anticipated, doesn’t deliver any kind of solace. In just a few seconds, what we have known all along becomes a horror – loopholes in a wall at the back of what might have been a cinema or a school hall, populated by faceless weapons suddenly roaring hatred and betrayal. 

Later it dwells symbolically on different faces, former neighbours, recently antagonists, gathered in a school watching their children play together after the conflict. Those images may look like reconciliation; but the concept is relative, if not irrelevant.

Watching ”Quo Vadis, Aida” is not a comfortable experience. But that’s no reason not to see it. 

At Palace Electric