Memoria

Lottery West Films/Perth Festival
UWA Somerville

By Wolfgang von Flugelhorn

 

When I was ten I went to India with my parents. One of the places we visited was a national park that was a sanctuary for tigers and leopards. The afternoon we arrived there was a sighting of a tiger that had killed a tethered goat. We were bundled onto the back of an elephant and set off slowly and quietly into the jungle. 

 

After about twenty minutes the mahout silently stopped the elephant and indicated for us to look to our left. It took a moment for my eyes to distinguish the tiger lying beside the remains of the goat and looking at us about twenty feet away. 

 

Later that night (unbeknownst to my parents) I went for a walk along a road. I remember the mixture of fear, excitement and a sense of supernatural kinship with the creatures I imagined in the trees around me. 

 

The films of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul remind me of that experience. It’s not just because they’re set in the jungle, or that they involve strange encounters and journeys into the unknown. It’s also because they explore time, memory and repetition. Even structurally his films involve doubling. Watching them is like experiencing déjà vu.

 

The first one I saw was Blissfully Yours at the Melbourne Film Festival in 2003, followed by Tropical Malady at MIFF in 2004 and Syndromes and a Century in 2006. They’re rarely shown outside of festivals, and really need to be seen on the big screen; so you can imagine my excitement at the prospect of seeing his new film Memoria as part of Perth Festival at Somerville outdoor auditorium; especially as it’s only being screened at one cinema at a time around the world (except in the UK where for some reason it was released on multiple screens) and isn’t being released online or on DVD (at least for now). 

 

It’s also the first Weerasethakul film that isn’t shot in the rural north-eastern province of Thailand where he grew up; and the first that features an international cast, headed by Tilda Swinton. I felt some trepidation about all this, fearing that the filmmaker’s style might be compromised. I was also uncertain about an outdoor screening, given the level of concentration his films require, and their meticulous use of sound. 

 

In the event the experience exceeded my expectations. Memoria represents a further advance into the unknown – not least because of its setting and the sense of collaboration between director and star – on the part of a fearlessly avant-garde filmmaker. As for seeing it outdoors: while there were undoubtedly compromises, the screening was also enhanced by its surroundings. The jungle vistas and brooding skies of the final scenes blended into the dark outlines of the pines at Somerville stirring in the breeze beyond the edges of the screen. Leaving the auditorium, I felt like I hadn’t left the film.

 

Memoria is set in Colombia and concerns a recently widowed expatriate orchid-farmer living in Medellín named Jessica (Swinton) who travels to Bogotá to visit her sister Karen (Agnes Brekke). The latter has been hospitalised with a mysterious respiratory illness that seems to involve randomly falling asleep. While in Bogotá Jessica is suddenly afflicted with a mysterious complaint of her own, in the form of loud booming sounds that she alone hears. 

 

The film follows a series of encounters between her and a variety of ‘specialists’, including the medical team looking after her sister; a winsome young sound engineer named Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego) who attempts to recreate Jessica’s ‘sound’ electronically, based on her verbal descriptions; and a doctor (Constanza Gutiérrez) who refuses her request for Xanax and suggests she try Catholicism instead. Two subplots (also featuring specialists) involve the purchase of industrial equipment for the refrigeration of orchids, and a friendship with an anthropologist (Jean Balibar) studying ancient human bones uncovered during the construction of a subterranean tunnel in the Andes, including a female skull that appears to have been ritually perforated. 

 

The final act of the film involves an encounter with a different kind of specialist: an older man also named Hernán (Elkin Díaz), the younger Hernán having mysteriously disappeared, his university colleagues apparently unaware of his ever having existed. The older Hernán lives beside a stream in the Andes where he spends his time scaling fish. He also suffers from an even more mysterious ailment which entails being haunted by traumatic sound-memories that reverberate in objects around him and are transmitted to him by touch. 

Weerasethakul’s films often deal with afflictions and specialists, medical or otherwise, as well as questions of identity. The main character in Blissfully Yours suffers from a skin disease as well as from being an illegal Burmese immigrant; feigning muteness to conceal his poor Thai, he is refused a medical certificate because he lacks ID. The title of Tropical Malady (the Thai title ‘Satpralat’ literally means ‘monster’) refers to a shamanistic tiger-man whose gift is a kind of affliction, and perhaps also to the ‘affliction’ of love between him and a male soldier who is unwittingly hunting him. Syndromes and a Century is a love story involving two doctors (based on the Weerasethakul’s parents) played by the same actors in two different hospitals and time periods. More recently Cemetery of Splendour is set in a clinic where soldiers suffering from a mysterious sleeping sickness are treated by a medium who uses psychic powers to help their loved ones commune with them. 

The plot of Memoria is more elaborate than the preceding films, but the style is even less plot-driven and even more austere. Action and dialogue are minimal; Swinton refers in an interview to Jessica being less a ‘character’ than ‘a predicament’. Like its precursors, the film is shot in long, motionless takes with no intercutting, and colours are mostly reduced to muted tropical greens and greys; cinematography is by Weerasethakul’s regular collaborator Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, who also worked with Luca Guadagnino on Call Me By Your Name. Within each shot, movement is also minimal, and often limited to slight shifts in position by a human body, faint stirrings of vegetation, drifting clouds or distant flocks of birds. Lighting is entirely natural or practical, and the sound design (by Akitcharlerm Kalayanamitr, another regular collaborator) is similarly diegetic and minimalist, although in the closing scenes it becomes more densely layered before finally resolving into total silence. There’s an extraordinary visual ‘effect’ towards the end, but this occurs so slowly and quietly (and is so otherworldly) that initially one disbelieves one’s own eyes (much like the revelation of a tiger lying along the branch of a tree at the end of Tropical Malady).

Some of the most mesmerizing shots however take place in the built (internal and external) environments of Bogotá (Weerasethakul began his professional training as an architect) and involve Jennifer’s body slowly moving, positioning or adjusting itself in relation to things in space: circling a stray dog across a city square in a strange half-crouch; reaching over to insert her finger into a hole in an ancient skull; leaning forward to peer at a photo in an art gallery and then freezing when the lights suddenly go out. It’s like a minimalist dance performance, and unlike anything I’ve seen on film, though it reminded me of Swinton’s work in Jim Jarmusch’s languid vampire movie Only Lovers Left Alive (another film in which she embodies a character suffering from a kind of half-life).

In one of these scenes, Jennifer is crossing a road when an explosion that sounds like a car backfiring goes off, and a man in the crowd breaks and runs like a panic-stricken dog as if a traumatic memory has been triggered; she slows to a halt and stares after him while everyone else keeps walking. This foreshadows a dialogue scene in which Jennifer’s sister and brother-in-law remind her that someone she has asked after is dead; a parallel scene establishes the disappearance and erasure of the first, younger Hernán. 

The motif of heightened or selective perceptions and memories culminates in the encounter with the second, older Hernán, and the sounds that are transmitted to him through touch. To demonstrate, he picks up a stone by the stream and hears voices that appear to be traces of a mysterious act of violence that took place there. Hernán finds relief from this syndrome only in a form of sleep with his eyes open that resembles another kind of living death. In one of the most minimal shots in the film, we (and Jennifer) watch him lie down in the gently swaying grass and enter this state for what seems an eternity.

The image recalls the erotic scenes that take place in the grass by a stream in Blissfully Yours (and beyond them a pictorial lineage stretching back from Manet to Giorgione and Titian). However over the years Weerasethakul has shifted focus from eros and love to trauma and loss as forms of heightened sensibility. The title Memoria refers not simply to memory but more precisely to memorials, and the film itself can be seen as a kind of commemoration or monument. As a widow, Jennifer seems to be processing grief throughout the film, and this seems to put her in touch with a level of political and military trauma that lurks in the landscape and psyche of Colombia (and perhaps Weerasethakul’s Thailand). 

As the filmmaker remarked in typically minimalist fashion in a Q&A screened after the film: ‘She is a cinema.’ Another way of putting this might be to say that both Jennifer and Swinton are like a combined camera/projector/screen and sound recording/playback apparatus, or even a kind of medium (in both senses of the word). Character and actor could also be seen as doppelgängers or doubles of the filmmaker himself; watching the film feels like watching an improvised collaborative dance between them taking place in real time.

Weerasethakul has been lumped into the category of ‘slow cinema’ alongside such diverse filmmakers as Antonioni, Kubrick, Tarkovsky or Tsai Ming-Liang, but each of these uses ‘slowness’ to convey different things: Antonioni, bourgeois existential emptiness; Kubrick, inhuman structures and processes; Tarkovsky, mystical contemplation; Tsai, social alienation. Weerasethakul’s ‘slowness’ conveys something of all of these, but also a creaturely way of seeing, listening, feeling and being, a plenitude of sensation that borders on hallucination, considering the latter not only in terms of its content but also as a form of perception. (For those of a philosophical bent, I’ve written about this with reference to my own paraphenomenological researches – in India and elsewhere – in my book Unzeitlich Sein [Not Being On Time], translated by Humphrey Bower, unpublished).

Memoria won’t reward those who seek action, narrative or drama in films; but those who seek tigers in the forests of the night, or hands and eyes that frame their fearful symmetry, won’t be disappointed. 

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Memoria screened from Jan 24 to 31 at UWA Somerville as part of Perth Festival/Lotterywest Films and will be released in cinemas around Australia from April 7.

 

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Wolfgang von Flugelhorn is a writer, critic and non-conceptual artist based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born in Flugelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. He is editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flugelhorn where he holds a chair in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He is the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations), Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Limbo/Murina

Perth Festival/Lotterywest Films, UWA Somerville 

By Wolfgang von Flugelhorn 

 

Some years ago, I went on a cycling tour in the Scottish islands while engaged in para-phenomenological research and was fascinated and humbled by the landscape, history, culture and people. 

Scottish filmmaker Ben Sharrock's Limbo (screening at Somerville from January 17 to 23) is set on a remote island in the Outer Hebrides. The film focusses on a group of four asylum seekers living in a shared house while awaiting the processing of their claims for refugee status. The central character Omar (Amir El-Masri) is Syrian; his friend Farhad (Vikash Bhai) is from Afghanistan; Abedi (Kwabeda Ansah) and his putative brother Wasef (Ora Oyebiyi) are from Nigeria.

 

Limbo is largely shot on the island of Uist, but in the film both the island and the men’s situation are fictional. As Sharrock has acknowledged in interviews, refugees whose claims are accepted by the UK have indeed been sent to live in remote island communities in Scotland; but offshore detention (either in camps or in the community) of asylum seekers awaiting processing (as practised by Australia) has mercifully not (yet) been adopted by the UK. Indeed, strong objections by human rights groups were made when Boris Johnson and his Home Secretary Priti Patel floated the idea last year, and the proposal was hastily abandoned.

 

This element of fictionalisation is potentially misleading (especially for an Australian audience). It also has implications for the credibility of the plot: for example, when the two Nigerians are forcibly arrested (presumably for deportation) by police breaking into the house halfway through the film; and the frozen corpse of one of them is later found in the wilderness (presumably after having attempted to escape) by a traumatised Omar. Audience members around me were shocked by these scenes, but for me the sense of hyperbole weakened the film’s case, despite my sympathy with its intentions.

 

Despite Sharrock spending time on Uist while writing the screenplay, and the undoubted rigours involved in shooting there, paradoxically the film feels as though it could have been shot anywhere. The representation of the island community is largely confined to a few comic-eccentric, unsympathetic or hostile stereotypes, most of which are written and performed in a clichéd ‘deadpan’ style. Possibly this is intended to reflect the experience of asylum-seekers and refugees, but it felt like a somewhat one-dimensional portrayal of that experience (and of remote island communities). 

 

The visual language of the film (strikingly composed and shot by cinematographer Nick Cooke) exacerbates this problem. Like Wes Anderson’s recent film The French Dispatch, Limbo is mostly framed in a ‘boxed-in’ 4:3 ratio (apart from the final scene of the film, which is in conventional widescreen format), and shot in long takes by a motionless or very slowly moving camera. Within each shot, people, buildings, vehicles and objects like telephone booths, streetlights or playground equipment are ‘placed’ apparently at random in relation to their environment, dressed or painted in colours like blue or pink that deliberately clash with the green-and-grey of the island vegetation, and mostly positioned at the centre of the frame on the horizon line of an otherwise apparently unpopulated wilderness. There is also little narrative logic or sense of how much time has passed from one scene to the next. Again, this cumulative effect of spatial and temporal dislocation, artificiality, incongruity and isolation may have been intended to reflect the experience of the asylum seekers, but it feels like a somewhat stilted representation of island life. 

 

In general, the absurdist style and content reminded me of the films of Palestinian director/actor Elia Suleiman and Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismäki (and before them Jacques Tati). However, these filmmakers have a far more nuanced aesthetic and socio-political vision. Their films are also much funnier. Audience members around me were laughing at the scenes in which the asylum seekers are forced to take ‘cultural awareness’ classes at the hands of the humourless Helga (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and hapless Boris (Kenneth Collard), but I found these scenes painfully forced and condescending.

 

The film works best when focussed solely on the asylum seekers themselves, whether as figures in the landscape or literally ‘boxed’ inside their house. Their characters, stories and performances are allowed to unfold and open up (in contrast with those of the islanders), especially in the case of El-Masri as Omar and Bhai as Farhad, though for me the outstanding performance in the film comes from Kais Nashef (superb in Hany Abu-Assad’s drama about suicide bombers, Paradise Now) in an unexpected late appearance as Omar’s brother Nabil. 

 

As my old friend Hannah Arendt wrote about the paradoxical state of ‘statelessness’ (the German term heimatlos might be more poignantly translated as ‘without a homeland’), asylum seekers are excluded not only from a territory or place to belong, but from the legal or political rights that go with it (including, as Arendt put it, even ‘the right to have rights’). This does not exclude them from representation, either through realism or allegory (Kafka and Beckett come to mind). Limbo seems to fall between these two stools into its own generic ‘limbo’ – or perhaps into the ‘fish-out-of-water’ or ‘quirky independent film’ genre, which borrows the stylistic tics of absurdism while remaining ostensibly realistic in content. (I had similar misgivings about Roberto Benigni’s comedy-drama about the HolocaustLife Is Beautiful. Chaplin’s Great Dictator or Lubitsch’s To Be Or Not To Be on the other hand manage to poke fun at Nazism by locating themselves in the parallel universe of Chaplinesque vaudeville or the theatrical fantasy-world of Lubitschland.)

 

The most interesting scene in Limbo for me is the surreal encounter between Omar and his brother Nabil in an abandoned cottage in the wilderness, partly because the encounter is clearly paranormal or possibly a dream/fantasy. Conversely, I found the final scene of Omar’s concert in the village hall (which is shot in widescreen to signify his sense of liberation) when he plays his oud like a virtuoso (the intercutting is obvious) sentimental and fake. Possibly this scene too is meant to be a fantasy; if so it feels like a falsely consoling one.

 

We are left with a final shot of Omar walking away up a road. We don’t know how much time has passed, what’s happened, or where he’s going. Once again, perhaps the meaning of the shot is intentionally unclear. To me however it felt like he was still boxed-in by Sharrock’s film.

 

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The night after seeing Limbo I attended a preview screening of Murina, the debut feature by Croatian filmmaker Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović, which screens at Somerville from 31 January to 6 February.

 

The title refers to the Croatian word for the moray eel, and the plot concerns a Croatian fishing family. Julija (Gracija Filipović) is a rebellious teenager who dives for eels with her domineering father Ante (Leon Lučev), while the latter keeps both his daughter and his complaint wife Nela (Danica Ćurčić) firmly under his control. Their emotionally and financially precarious existence is disrupted by a visit from a wealthy friend, Javier (New Zealand actor Cliff Curtis), whom Ante is hoping will buy and develop a portion of his land. However, it gradually emerges that Javier was Ante’s former employer and once had an affair with Nela. Residual tensions resurface and are stirred up further by Julija, who is fascinated by Javier (both sexually and as an alternative father-figure) and sees him as a means of escape from her father and his world.  

 

In a sense Murina is a coming-of-age drama, with an added sense of latent violence which ratchets up the tension almost to the level of a thriller. Finely judged performances from all the leads (but particularly Ćurčić as a woman trapped in an abusive relationship and trying to keep her family intact while still in love with another man who also objectifies her) are supported by a tight script and direction, with a clear-eyed focus on the nuances of coercive control. 

 

Like Limbo, Murina features a spectacular island location, in this case on the Adriatic coast, not far from where my parents honeymooned in Dubrovnik. However, it features far more nuanced writing, acting and direction than Limbo, as well as more (appropriately) fluid and dynamic camerawork and editing. In particular, the film boasts a series of alternately dreamlike and dramatic underwater sequences involving Julija (Filipović is also a professional swimmer) that had me literally holding my breath. French cinematographer Hélène Louvart also worked on Wim Wender’s immersive 3D documentary Pina, and more recently Maggie Gyllenhaal’s psychological drama The Lost Daughter, a film which also makes sensuous and complex use of a seaside location. In Murina the rocky coastline becomes an emotional landscape that reminded me of Antonioni’s L’Avventura or Godard’s Contempt, films which also use rocky coastal settings to explore domestic and erotic tensions. If Murina doesn’t have the same underlying level of existential despair as those films, it makes up for that with a more acute contemporary sense of feminine subjectivity, gender and class politics. For those who shy away from Antonioni or Godard, it’s also considerably shorter and more exciting.

 

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Limbo screened from Jan 17 to 23 at UWA Somerville as part of Perth Festival/Lotterywest Films. Murina screens from Jan 31 to Feb 6.

 

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Wolfgang von Flugelhorn is a writer, critic and non-conceptual artist based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born in Flugelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. He is editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flugelhorn where he holds a chair in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He is the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations), Sein Unzeitlich (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.  

 

 

 

Benedetta/Quo Vadis, Aida?

Perth Festival/Lotterywest Films 
UWA Somerville  

By Wolfgang von Flugelhorn

‘Are all his films like that?’ my friend Sister Angelica of the Order of the Second Coming asked as we lounged back in our deckchairs at the Somerville open air auditorium while the credits rolled at the end of Paul Verhoeven’s latest opus Benedetta about the eponymous 16^th century lesbian nun and self-proclaimed visionary.

 

‘Yes,’ I replied. At least this was true of the ones I’d seen. The Fourth Man, Robocop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Starship Troopers, Elle: all different genres (mostly thrillers or sci-fi) and made in different countries and cinematic contexts (the Netherlands, Hollywood, France); but all featuring graphic sex and violence; all with a comic-book visual and narrative style; all with an underlying level of socio-political satire; and all focussing on bodies and flesh, either glistening and golden or being pulverized or ripped apart.

 

‘But why did he make us watch the two nuns having sex like that with the dildo carved out of a statuette of the Virgin Mary?’ asked Sister Angelica, referring to one of the scenes between Benedetta (Virginie Effira, the apparently tolerant wife of a serial rapist in Verhoeven’s previous French film Elle) and her lover the novice Bartolomea (Daphné Patakia). ‘It was all from the point of view of the male gaze. Perhaps that was intentional, but I didn’t get the point.’

 

True, I reflected. Verhoeven would probably be the first to admit that the scene was indeed shot from the perspective of the (or at least a) male gaze (his own); he might even ask what other perspective he could possibly have. He might also point out that the scene is actually watched through a spyhole by the gaze of another female character (albeit a gaze he himself has imagined): the Abbess (Charlotte Rampling, who has two of the best lines in the film, ‘Miracles never happen in bed’, and ‘I didn’t want her to die – at least, not so quickly’). This might raise a series of further questions: to what extent are female and male fantasies fundamentally different or (paradoxically) the same; to what extent are Verhoeven’s characters (regardless of gender or sexuality) versions of himself; and what’s the relationship between the respective gazes of the characters, the director, and the film’s spectators (male or female, queer or straight)? All of which are questions that Verhoeven might enjoy provoking us with.

 

‘But why did it have to be so violent? I mean, the torture scene with that hideous instrument…’

 

When I last met up with Paul for a beer in Amsterdam in early 2020 he told me how much fun he had growing up in Nazi-occupied Holland during the Allied bombardments of V1 and V2 rocket launching sites near where he lived with his parents in The Hague. He said it was all a big adventure, but he also mentioned seeing burning buildings and mutilated corpses in the streets and acknowledged that his wartime experiences were probably the source of all his films. As for Benedetta, he simply referred matter-of-factly to the violence that was perpetrated against women in early 17^th century Europe and said that the torture inflicted on Bartolomea under the supervision of the Papal Nuncio (a deliciously over-the-top Lambert Wilson) reflected the misogyny and hypocrisy of the Catholic Church. In the same vein, he pointed to the actual existence of police brutality in the United States (which was fetishized in films like Lethal Weapon) when people objected to the ‘excessive’ violence in Robocop. 

 

‘But feels like he’s having his cake and eating it too. I mean, he’s criticising or satirising violence, patriarchy and the male gaze, but he’s also perpetrating and enjoying it.’

 

It’s true that watching a Verhoeven movie is a guilty pleasure. You could say that they all deal with pornography (sexual or violent), propaganda (political or religious), and the relationship between them, both in terms of overt content and underlying form: how are pornography or propaganda communicated; and how are they seen (or not-seen)? However his films are also undeniably exciting, sexy, scary and funny, at least to his admirers. A hilarious example of this is the TV military recruitment ads in Starship Troopers, which show glimpses of violence and glamorous troopers, and end with the teasing refrain: ‘Would you like to know more?’ I guess you could say that his films are pornographic, and even propagandistic, perhaps unavoidably; that that's an essential part of their problematic pleasure.

'Like a child being excited by explosions and body parts.'

Possibly. I wasn't sure if she was referring to Verhoeven or me.

 

‘But was he presenting Benedetta as a genuine mystic; or as someone with a mental illness; or simply as a faker?’

 

All of the above. It's true that her visions seemed more like fantasies or hallucinations, with cheesy content, acting, costumes, lighting and special effects; the miracles (including the statue of Mary that fell on her without crushing her, the appearance of stigmata, and her speaking with the voice of Christ) seemed increasingly fake; and her behaviour increasingly manipulative – displacing the Abbess, pursuing her affair with Bartolomea, and deliberately infecting the Nuncio with the plague (mind you, he deserved it). 

'So was he saying that she was a saint or a sinner, a psychotic or a psychopath?'

It's not a simple ‘either/or’. In the end, we don’t know for sure; which is surely appropriate. In fact many of Verhoeven’s films deal with the borderline between fantasy and paranoia. The ambiguity of Benedetta’s visions and miracles resembles Arnold Schwarzenegger’s adventures in Total Recall (as he says in the last line of that film, ‘If this is a dream, you’d better kiss me before I wake up’); not to mention the delusions and hallucinations that afflict the bisexual writer in The Fourth Man, a film which deals even more explicitly with the connection between sex, violence, Catholicism and psychosis. As Paul remarked to me at our last meeting in Amsterdam, ‘Christianity is a symptom of schizophrenia affecting half the world’s population’. (I didn’t mention this last remark to Sister Angelica.)

 

As my old friend and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (who saw me for a few sessions in Paris before his death in 1981) said about Bernini’s statue of Saint Teresa of Avila being pierced by an angel with an arrow: ‘She’s coming, there’s no doubt about it.’ But how could he (or for that matter Bernini) know for sure? Lacan also said that mystics experience ecstasy without knowing or being able to say anything about it; and that women are able to experience a ‘surplus enjoyment’ unavailable to men; but really, how could he know that either? Only Tiresias (who according to Greek myth experienced lovemaking as both a man and a woman) could know that; and Tiresias was, precisely, mythical. 

However, I decided not raise any of this with Sister Angelica, and to postpone any theological discussion of the Second Coming to another time. 

 

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Bosnian filmmaker Jasmila Žbanić’s Quo Vadis, Aida? ­– which we saw at Somerville the following Monday – is a very different film from Benedetta in terms of genre and style. However it also features a central female character navigating a violently toxic masculine environment riven by religious (or more precisely ethno-nationalist) prejudice. A fictional account of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide of Bosnian Muslims by Serbian forces, it might be described as a war movie that focusses on the impact of war on civilians rather than combatants. As such it resembles the kind of neo-realist work (in a lineage stretching from Rossellini to Paul Greengrass’s United 93) that Verhoeven never made about his own childhood. 

 

Žbanić grew up in Sarajevo and was a teenager there when the city was under siege during the Bosnian War. Her previous films Grbavica and Na Putu (On the Path) are set in her home city in the aftermath of the war, and focus respectively on a single mother and victim of the systematic rape of Bosnian Muslim women by Serbian soldiers, and a young Bosnian Muslim couple trying to find their way in post-war Bosnian society. The eponymous hero of Quo Vadis, Aida? (a searing performance by Serbian actress Jasna Đuričić) is a Bosnian Muslim translator working for a Dutch UN peacekeeping battalion during the siege of the town of Srebrenica by Serbian forces. The plot focusses on Aida’s attempts to save her husband and two sons from the impending massacre, in which an estimated 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were rounded up and shot by the Serbs, while the UN forces failed to protect them.

 

The style of the film is lean and economical, with virtually no soundtrack music or onscreen violence. Even the massacre itself when it inevitably comes is depicted by the image of machine guns poking through window slits into a town hall and firing, without showing the impact on the bodies of the men and boys we have just seen cowering inside, in an almost textbook example of Eisensteinian montage. The next, almost equally telling shot shows people in the square outside the hall going about their business apparently unmoved by the sound of gunfire. 

 

Complicity rather than savagery is in fact arguably the real subject of the film. On more than one occasion I was reminded of my old friend Hannah Arendt’s phrase ‘the banality of evil’: for example when the Serbian commander Ratko Mladić (played with chilling calm by Serbian actor Boris Isaković) tosses bars of Toblerone and cans of Coke to the crowd of refugees inside the UN compound to reassure them of his good intentions and encourage their cooperation. 

 

However for me the most potent images came in the final reel when Aida returns to live and work in Srebrenica as a schoolteacher after the war has ended. Bulldozers are seen digging up piles of earth in the town square; in the next shot, we see Muslim women (Aida amongst them) inside the hall wandering among rows of human bones and items of clothing. Finally Aida collapses beside a collection of bones and clothing, and we recognise a pair of sneakers that we saw one of her sons putting on at the start of the film. 

In another scene, she passes a man carrying bags of groceries on the stairs leading to her old apartment; he says hello without looking at her, and she recognises the face of a Serbian soldier we saw bullying his way into the UN compound before the massacre. We see his face again in the final scene: a proud parent watching his child in a performance at the school where Aida is teaching. 

Such images demonstrate Žbanić’s mastery of visual storytelling and condensed but complex meaning. There are no easy answers or consoling messages in this film. The massacre happened because no one stopped it. Life goes on, but justice or forgiveness remain open questions. Mladic was convicted as a war criminal and sentenced to life imprisonment; and the Dutch Government accepted some responsibility for their failure to protect the civilians supposedly under their care; but thousands of perpetrators were never charged, and denialism is still widespread.

 

As the credits rolled, I asked Sister Angelica about the title. She explained that it comes from the Latin words ‘Quo vadis, domine?’ (‘Where are you going, lord?’), which according to tradition were spoken by Peter when he was fleeing persecution in Rome and encountered the risen Christ. The latter answered, ‘I am going to Rome to be crucified again’, whereupon Peter went back to the city to continue his ministry and was crucified upside down. 

 

I thought of Aida, going back to Srebrenica to continue her ‘ministry’ as a teacher and being ‘crucified again’. 

I asked Sister Angelica about the doctrine of the Second Coming, and she answered quietly, ‘It happens all the time.’

 

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Benedetta screened from Mon 3 to Sat 8 February, and Quo Vadis, Aida? is currently screening until Sat 15 February at UWA Somerville as part of Perth Festival/Lotterywest Films.  

 

Wolfgang von Flugelhorn is a writer, critic and non-conceptual artist based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born in Flugelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. He is editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flugelhorn where he holds a chair in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He is the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations), Sein Unzeitlich (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.