Oh, the agony

First let me say that I love foreign films, so a great part of the appeal of this class for me was the opportunity to really get to know foreign films, their filmmakers, and their cultural and historical contexts.  

If, however, my first exposure to foreign films was Before the Rain, I might very well have gone no further and instead contented myself with such highbrow entertainment as High School Musical.

With all due respect to Janet Maslin and Roger Ebert, I did not find Before the Rain to be "sophisticated," "an art film about war," or "poetry."  My sentiments were more in line with Rita Kempley's:  impenetrable, narratively weak and occasionally akin to a "soap operetta."  

Director Milčo Mančevski, who wrote the script's first draft in a week (Richard Woodward, "Slav of New York"), purports to educate us ignorant Westerners on the ills, travails, oddities and atrocities occurring in Macedonia.  He achieves this, to some degree, albeit in a very ham-fisted, precious, art house kind of way.  We certainly learn that murder and evil are capricious, not hemmed in by family bloodlines, and not entirely unavoidable.  Mančevski even shows us photos from the Holocaust, just to ram home the message that we haven't learned anything after all.  The systematic destruction and murder of people based on their culture, religion or ethnicity still exist.  Too bad Darfur happened after this film was made; no doubt Mančevski would have thrown in some photos from that as well.  

A line uttered in the film on more than one occasion - just in case we miss the importance of it the first time around - says that "time never dies; the circle is never round."  This is exemplified in the three stories contained within Before the Rain in a couple of ways:  first, the three stories are tied to each other through common characters, and Mančevski employs a nonlinear storytelling device.  Try to make sense of the timeline of this film, because it is not there to make.

The sweetest, for lack of a better word, story of the three is the first one, "Words," an ironic title given that one of the characters, a young Macedonian monk, has taken a two-year vow of silence.  The monk shields - and quickly falls in love with - a young girl on the run, being chased by her family because she killed one of them.  The reason behind her crime is not explained, which Mančevski perhaps intends as a symbol of the unfeeling, boundary-less nature of war.  The monk and the girl run off together, and the ending to their tale is a harbinger of endings to come.  

The second story, called "Faces," is set in London, and features a photo editor torn between her cold, remote (Mančevski all but uses a tight shot of a stiff upper lip) British husband and swarthy, passionate Macedonian photographer lover.  The latter reunites with her briefly in the back of a taxi before heading toward home.  She then meets up with the estranged husband, confronts him regarding the state of their marriage and other issues, and then, echoing "Words," suffers a tragedy.  

The photographer's story makes up the third installment, "Pictures."  Aleks hasn't been home in 16 years, although his return hardly is heralded throughout the town.  The first resident he meets, a surly teen (Mančevski clearly enjoys his stereotypes), is holding an automatic rifle.  Aleks desperately wants to see Hana, his Albanian former lover, despite resistance from his family and hers.  We know from "Words" and "Faces" that this will not end well.  

Before the Rain strikes me as one of those Very Important Movies that I am supposed to embrace, but I just can't.  It is too precious; Mančevski tries too hard to be artistic in imparting his Message.

I struggled to connect to this film, but I am willing to accede the possibility that watching it on my laptop through YouTube may have played a part in that.