Before the Rain. - movie reviews

National Review, April 3, 1995 by John Simon

As I keep saying, any film that does well at the Sundance Festival is ipso facto a dud; Before the Rain, written and directed by the Macedonian Milcho Manchevski, is no exception. This is a pretentiously artsy concoction that plays tricks with chronology that do not fall into place, and that fails to create rounded, believable characters and situations.

It profits from structural similarities to Pulp Fiction, a sorry thing to base one's success on.In the first section, ``Words,'' Kiril, a young monk in a Macedonian monastery who has taken a vow of silence, discovers Zamira, an Albanian Moslem girl in boy's clothing, hiding in his cell. She is running from a posse of Macedonian Christians from a neighboring village, one of whom she has, apparently, killed. (This is left cavalierly unclear.) The posse invades the monastery, wreaking havoc to the extent of machine-gunning the monastery cat for being a Moslem, though if ever there was a Greek Orthodox cat, this was it. Kiril immediately falls for Zamira; with the help of the monks, they escape together, but the girl is eventually shot by her own brother (heavy symbolism!).In Section Two, ``Faces,'' Anne, a London photograph agent, looks at pictures of the strife-torn Balkans taken by her lover, Aleksandar, a Macedonian photojournalist, among which are shots of Kiril and Zamira as we saw them in ``Words.'' Aleksandar shows up, and he and Anne have sex in a moving taxi (the entire scene is shot as a reflection in the cab's window, superimposed on the passing London cityscape); but Anne finds it hard to commit herself to the fellow because she is also in love with her estranged husband, Nick. She and Nick discuss their problems in a restaurant where an ex-Yugoslav waiter somehow falls afoul of a patron who is his compatriot; the latter produces an Uzi and shoots the waiter and decimates the innocent clientele. Nick is among the dead. Aleksandar, incensed by Anne's hesitancy, returns to his Macedonian village, which he hasn't seen in 16 years.Part Three, ``Pictures,'' has Aleksandar involved with both his own Christian people and the neighboring Moslems, among them his ex-sweetheart, now widowed, with whom he hopes to reconnect. But the bloody religious divisions are such that he falls afoul of both factions, and ends up getting shot by his own people -- more weighty symbolism. This section, ``Pictures,'' takes place just before ``Words,'' so how could Aleksandar, dead, have taken the pictures Anne was looking at in ``Faces''?Such non- sequiturs do not bother the reviewers. As Janet Maslin writes: ``Neither . . . such loose ends nor the film's slight [!] straining of its rain metaphor diminishes the final impact of an overwhelming vision.'' The quality of critical mercy is not strained; it droppeth like the Macedonian rain from Heaven. Yet there is no end to the movie's artsy-fartsiness. In the London sequence, there are endless panning shots of traffic, pedestrians, urban bustle; in Macedonia, there are endless panning shots of filter-enhanced mountains, sea, sunsets, clouds, rain. It is a veritable whoring after visual significance, while the words remain self-inflatedly sophomoric.Because no Macedonian could be found to play the spiritual, delicate young monk, a French actor was recruited; so Kiril is saddled with a vow of silence unshared by any of the other monks. That saves money on dubbing, and when, at last, he does utter a few dubbed words, what poignancy, what art! There is no reason for starting the London section with Anne in the shower, but a discreet nude scene, what artistry! The restaurant massacre is gorily overdirected, but the more violence you spell out -- with however faulty orthography -- the more ``overwhelming'' your ``vision.''Rade Serbedzija, a leading ex-Yugoslav actor, is good, though a bit over the top, as Aleksandar; Katrin Cartlidge (last seen in Mike Leigh's dreadful Naked) is convincing as the vacillating Anne; the supporting cast of local characters exudes colorful authenticity. But Before the Rain, in its pretentiousness, is inauthentic. I find it fitting that Miss Maslin marvelingly compares Milcho Manchevski, with his ``hauntingly oblique connections,'' to Krzysztof Kieslowski and Atom Egoyan, two of the smuggest phonies in today's barren cinema.