Film: Before the Rain1994, Macedonia
Directed by Milcho Manchevski
Post a brief (~250–500 words) review of the film you chose and at least one other review of it.
I watched the 1994 Milcho Manchevski film Before the Rain with high expectations. I couldn't help but compare it with another movie that is set in the Balkans (Danis Tanovic's No Man's Land, 2001) which I saw several years ago and loved. Unfortunately, Before the Rain did not live up to the expectations I had for it and it failed to provide any significant historical context for understanding the Balkan conflicts.
It's not hard for me to understand why I prefer No Man's Land as a film. It's a dark, ironic tragicomedy in contrast to Before the Rain, which is as serious a drama as ever took itself too seriously. I prefer existential dilemmas that are couched in their own little absurd conundrums, and this is where No Man's Land excells, while Before the Rain attempts to woo the viewer with its dream-like circularity and repetitions that are a little too obvious and superficial to be instructive. In each of Before the Rain's three sections, someone vomits. Should we pause to consider the deeper meaning of this heavily-made point?
Let's go from start to finish. Part One, Words, shows promise. It is set in Macedonia, where there is a young priest who has taken a vow of silence. He lives in a monastery and is faced with the choice of hiding or turning in a mysterious refugee who is hiding in his attic room. He chooses to hide and feed her, and thig gives the story movement, and at the end of part one, the young refugee is murdered by her own family as she attempts to either flee from them or stop the young priest from leaving her there with her murderous clan. Part One is a pretty compelling short story on film, and if it ended there, I would have found it poignant.
Part Two is home to several scenes which make me wonder if they were included to reach some sort of minimum running time. There are utterly gratuitous scenes: one involving a naked woman in a shower and another involving the same woman, half naked in a Taxi. What these two scenes might hope to tell us about anything or anyone in the movie is beyond me. There is a scene in which a murderous restaurant patron begins shooting everyone in sight with what appears to be a limitless supply of bullets. Yes, we can understand that violence in one country does not necessarily stay there; it spills out and over borders - it touches the innocent. We know that and might be more moved by it if the central characters in part two were not completely made of emotional cardboard. The British female journalist is thoroughly irksome and her Macedonian lover is selfish and hotheaded. Not a couple I am led to care about.
The Madedonian Lover, Alex, becomes the central character in Part Three, which takes place again in Macedonia. A world traveler and photojournalist, he has come home with an apparent death wish. He does not appear to have any drive to affect a change in the forces that are tearing apart his homeland, he goes about his daily life with as much forethought and subtlety as we might expect from one who attempts to have sex with a married lover in a moving taxing in broad London daylight. I kept wondering... does anyone have any sense in this movie at all? What's the lesson here? What do I want to take from this film, what should I have learned?
I wondered how this film could have garnered so much praise - a foreign-language film Oscar Nominations, a glowing review by Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert who said "This is one of the year's best films...Work like this is what keeps me going." Ebert seems to think that the time paradoxes contained within the movie are successful in conveying the idea that we are not trapped by time, but that there is room for escape. But none of our film's characters have much of a chance to escape their fate, and as our professor Jeff pointed out in our online discussion, two of the three fatalities in the film occur from "friendly fire" - people killing their own people, not their enemies.
In the end, the characters are too one-dimensional and the situations too predictible to be truly inspiring. When we find out that Macedonia was not involved in the same level of violence as other Balkan states, the film has even less relevance. Perhaps it was meant as a "dream-warning" for those who thought themselves insulated from the problems occurring in Serbia, Croatia, Kosovo. But the end product seems like a heavy-handed attempt at art-house lecturing, and falls short of almost every goal it sets for itself. One reminder I did take from the viewing: don't take the film-maker's word for it; historical films are not necessarily historically accurate and they may not provide any more context to the issues at hand than the average war film does.
I recommend No Man's Land to anyone who'd like to see a better film set in the Balkans. It is superior to Before the Rain in every measurable way.
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Photo Source: http://faq.macedonia.org/the.arts/btr.html
