Before the Rain: The Neverending Story (2023)

Bbefore the rainHe brought to the world a vision of the "Balkan conflict" that caused a sensation in the mid-1990s, winning the Golden Lion in Venice and being nominated for an Oscar. Five years of increasingly gruesome news from the former Yugoslavia, with violent fighting and massacres in Croatia and Bosnia, made Milcho Manchevski's scathing but lyrical film timely in a way few filmmakers could. But this is a far cry from a documentary treatment of Balkan violence, and the country that Manchevski put on the map, his native Macedonia, was actually the only Balkan state at the time.nodevoured by war or ethnic conflicts.

Manchevski had no intention of explaining the devastating sequence of events that began in 1991, when federal Yugoslavia dissolved in the same year that the Soviet Union itself disintegrated. Raised in Skopje, he completed his film education in the USA, where he made a name for himself with music videos in the 1980s.before the raintake something from this experience. But if Manchevski belongs to the generation of filmmakers who grew up with the pop poetry of music videos as part of their natural vocabulary, his other inspiration is certainly the Western, an impression borne out by his equally ambitious second feature film.Staub(2001).

Think of Sam Peckinpah's westerns, elegiac homages to a way of life crushed by modernity. Or Sergio Leone, whose films were once known as "spaghetti westerns" but were actually baroque variations on the great American western tradition and influenced filmmakers everywhere after the 1960s. Peckinpah and Leone delved into myths about history and weren't afraid to use extreme violence to look artistic and realistic. The violence that tearsbefore the rain,On the slopes of Macedonia and in a London restaurant, he turns to these mentors for his influence. And if Manchevski insists that his film isn't "about" Macedonia or even the Balkans, he's certainly aiming for the same universality as the last great westernsOnce upon a time in the westÖwild group.The character portrayed by his hero, Aleksandar, is already a romantic in London, but in Macedonia he definitely becomes a westerner when he returns to his old city, only to be immediately confronted by an armed youth.

The film's details are carefully balanced not to provoke a cynical reaction ("more Balkan chaos") but to make it clear that this is an endless cyclical process in which Muslims blame Christians and provoke retaliatory action from Christians. 🇧🇷 The two armed gangs that we encounter in the first part of the film, both with gunmen ready to fire, are in fact equivalent, although one claims to avenge Macedonian Christian honor and the other Muslim Albanian values. But we should be clear that no one pretends to be typical of modern Macedonians such as we briefly see when Aleksandar arrives in Skopje, any more than they are typical of the ubiquitous idealists and opportunists we now call terrorists .

Terrorism was certainly on Europe's agenda when Manchevski first wrote the draft of the film in 1991 after a return visit to Macedonia. But bombings, assassinations and kidnappings were more common in Britain, Italy and Germany at the time, as the radio news Anne hears in her photo agency office during the London episode recalls. Bombing warnings from Irish Republicans were almost routine in England from the 1970s to the late 1990s, giving authenticity and poignancy to his farewell to Aleksandar in a London cemetery. He leaves her in London under a terrorist threat to return to "peaceful" Macedonia. What is surprising about Manchevski's circular shape, like a short story by Borges or a film by Alain Resnais, is that Anne sees images of the future in her London light box. This is a world united by violence: much of it conveyed through photography and the news, but all potentially local and gory, as both protagonists will so brutally discover.

It was certainly the feeling that Manchevski could tell a truly European and not just a Balkan story that drew his followers. Simon Perry, producer of over a dozen prominent European films while running state investor British Screen, became the driving force behind the film; and the British European Co-Production Fund participated, as did French producers and the Ministry of Culture of the young Republic of Macedonia. For two decades, European governments and cross-border entities have struggled with the problem of connecting their individual film industries to more effectively tell stories that reflect the reality of a continent where London and Skopje are just hours apart, and constantly have people travel between them.before the rainpaved the way for other mid-'90s films to do so, such as Ken Loachcountry and freedom(1995) and Lars von Trierbreaking waves(nineteen ninety six). All three were notable box office, festival and critical successes in several countries. And they all told tough, emotionally complex stories embedded in their landscapes and the stories of their characters. However, they were all shot on a tight budget and patiently pieced together from various sources. jbefore the rainIt almost suffered the sort of last-minute disaster that's a well-known trait of European cinema when one of its original sponsors, Channel Four Television, pulled out, leaving British Screen to salvage the production.

Common character in von Trier's big film and inbefore the rainis Katrin Cartlidge, who died suddenly in 2002 at the age of 41. After her beginnings in soap operas and sitcoms, Cartlidge emerged as a striking and bold actress in the early 1990s. It debuted in Mike Leigh's Cannes winner.Not(1993), who plays an absent-minded addict in this dark comedy of modern customs, later became the face of Manchevski's movie poster before starring in two other Leigh impromptu,professional girls(1997) elegs in the air(1999). He returned to the home of Danis Tanovic in the Balkansnobody's country(2001), is set during the Bosnia-Herzegovina conflict and plays a reporter. Cartlidge was never conventionally glamorous, but she brought presence and conviction to all her roles in a tragically short career. Insidebefore the rain,manages to bridge the gap between contemporary London and 'timeless' Macedonia, between a modern career woman juggling work and relationships and a sculptural figure mourning an ancient landscape.

Rade Serbedzija, a respected Croatian stage actor and Yugoslav film and TV star, does the same but in reverse. He lived in exile as the photojournalist he plays, an exotic character in the film's central London sequence, before returning to Macedonia and attempting to resume his former life in a now fatally polarized community. Aleksandar dies trying to save the Muslim girl we saw at the beginning of the film, protected by an innocent young monk, Aleksandar's nephew, touchingly played by aspiring French actor Grégoire Colin. Serbedzija's own life mirrored her role in the film as she campaigned for peace and reconciliation in Bosnia, performing with Vanessa Redgrave in Sarajevo while also pursuing a successful film career in Hollywood.

before the rainHe conveyed a certain image of the Balkans to a wide audience and brought Macedonia and Manchevski to the world stage. It was also the first film shot (partly) in Macedonian to be widely viewed internationally. But looking back more than ten years, one might wonder if his success is as much a result of his timing as it is of his intrinsic qualities. I had the unusual experience of attending an international seminar on cinema held in Florence in 1999, where for two days experts spoke on various aspects of its history and context. That the film could contain such an extensive discussion was remarkable. But what also emerged was how good a wish was Manchevski's to create something that wasnothe report or the story or a political analysis managed to leave the film open to different interpretations.

I was particularly intrigued by his use of landscape. I later learned how much Manchevski had created the landscape that we might call typical of Macedonia, repairing roads to inaccessible places and merging very different spaces into a composite, as in the monastery around which the first episode is set. But what matters is not its authenticity as a place; Instead, it's the image of a seemingly timeless pastoral landscape juxtaposed with London, in reality so historic - and how it makes connections, particularly through the churches and cemeteries we see in both, and through the graphic wartime photographs that Anne heads towards see is. in London while Aleksandar is back where the footage was taken. Perhaps film's greatest achievement is taking our images of certain types of places and the stories we hope to find there and unraveling them and showing how they are connected and influence each other. Just like a classic landscape painting by Nicolas Poussin or a grainy war photograph by Don McCullin,before the rainis a film about images and how we deal with them, whether we take them seriously or just see them as picturesque. An image is an object, like the smeared Madonna painting we see, but it is also a connection to another reality. This is an issue on which Manchevski has since returned more explicitlyStaub, more inbefore the rainhas made an important and, I suppose, classic statement: a film about images that deserve to be included in the same sentence as Chris Marker's.ach Pierand Miguel Angel Antonioniblow.

She also shared a harrowing tale of loss and brutalization, of the daily price paid when men take up arms to assert their identity, and particularly the price paid by women engaged in such power struggles ( she is the daughter of El Aleksandar's childhood love). . ., Hana, whom he tries unsuccessfully to save in this intricate allegory of the revival of tribalism). Unfortunately, the film is surrounded by rain forecasts that have passed and are yet to come. One might wonder if it's Bob Dylan's "Heavy Rain," as Aleksandar jokingly suggests in London, or aEurope after the rainas in the large surrealist painting by Max Ernst painted in America during World War II, in which he shows a barren landscape almost devoid of life. The almost unbearably beautiful, albeit bloody, landscape ofbefore the raininvites us to reflect on our position on the future of "European civilization". Will it be the old tribal values ​​or the new tolerance and humanity?