Word: manchevski
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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These lives and deaths are ultimately linked in writer-director Milcho Manchevski's intricately structured Before the Rain, an Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Film. Anne and Aleksander are lovers--that is why her marriage is in trouble--while the refugee hiding in the monastery is the daughter of Aleksander's former lover. Even when the connections between characters are not that intimate, they sometimes know one another by sight, because commerce and communications keep shrinking the world. War zones nowadays have area codes, and the vision of a terrorist with a Kalashnikov in one hand and a cellular...
...wardrobe merely hints at a larger linkage that Manchevski, a young Macedonian filmmaker who somehow ended up at Southern Illinois University and moved on to music videos, wants to make. It is put simply by a doctor who is a minor character in his film: "War is a virus," meaning that, in an era of ethnic and religious conflict, the disease can be carried everywhere by impassioned terrorists and can infect anyone-in this case the young priest, the isolated Anne (who works as a photo editor, coolly studying images of violence) or even the seemingly well-inoculated Aleksander...
Telling his story in three movements (Words, Faces and Pictures), Manchevski deliberately blurs group identities. You have to strain to understand what ideals the people in this film are willing to die for (and, more to the point, kill for). One's idea of God as opposed to another's? The heritage of one's blood as opposed to that of someone else's? As we lean in to catch their garbled, often hysterical self-justifications, we also catch a larger point--that none of these principles is worth a single human life...
...Before the Rain," directed by Milcho Manchevski, is the story of the interconnected lives of four strangers. Beginning with the civil unrest in Macedonia, travelling to London and then returning to Macedonia, the film demonstrates that seemingly local violence registers across the world...
...this sounds too catchy, it may be. In order to maintain the film's circular structure Manchevski takes liberties with common sense. (At one point photographs are taken by a man who we later discover is already dead.) This dedication to structure undermines other aspects of the film as well. We are never allowed to become attached to one character, lest his story line stray too far from the rain. Just as we get to enjoy the company of this fascinating young monk we are pushed back to the beginning of the film. The viewer will not be immune...