Art/Movie and Theater

Before the Rain
Altin Topi
Alb-Club Feb 2000

In his first debut as film director of “Before the Rain", Milcho Manchevski, is extremely unpredictable in telling the story. He even doesn't try to find any explanation for such immutability of hatred and violence overwhelming dramatically the two neighboring settlements, the Macedonian christians and Albanian moslems. For him it looks as the best way to approach the story.

Everything starts and ends at the same point - “before the rain". The metaphoric rain and the sophisticated narrative style of the new director leave the audience during all the sequences of the film in a perplexity, sometimes in front of a puzzle full of paradoxes.
This is Manchevski, who tragically, poetically, transmits to us the primordial feelings of hate and love. Nothing happens chronologically in the film, but constant coincidences prepare the audience for shocking actions: the peaceful start in the garden of a monastery with a young monk named Kiril (Gregoire Colin) prepares all the further actions, an unexplained argument in the background of a London restaurant, a pregnant women in a cemetery, the birth of a lamb, a small boy with a machine gun, the madness of a countryman machining a cat, Alex's evocation of his first love, etc. Any of them contributes organically escalating the violence in a sudden disaster.

The director is very intelligent for not showing where his sympathy rests, none of the film's sequences reveals any nationalistic feelings. He only continues of telling realistically, scrupulously what's going on his intricate story. He denounces with great transparency how absurd and dangerous these divisions have become. That's why he leaves the audience overthrown by such looses, the tragic end of Alex and Zamira.

It is very unique how Manchevski builds up his story. For a non Balkans audience, parts of the story are extremely difficult to understand and follow. For them, it might remain unexplained how can love and hate stay tragically together. What can generate that deep hate and love so impossible? But for the Balkans, specially an Albanian or Macedonian, the film is only the revelation of a simple and dreadful truth. We see the truth through the eyes of Alex, not having visited home for sixteen years. The virus of the war has reached his native place, where the neighboring settlements are patrolling the villages in a state of war. Part of the shocking story is the end of the Macedonian photographer, Alexander(Rade Serbedzija) and the Albanian girl, Zamira(Labina Mitevska), when their lives were taken with such cruelty by their own people.

The director has created a formidable four characters cast. Anne(Katrin Cartlidge) is a British woman involved in a very difficult love with Alexander, a Macedonian photographer, a Pulitzer Prize winner. She doesn't realize that for her is no time left to change any part of her life. In the film she remains the witness and the victim of devastating circumstances. She is part of the second story "Faces” that not necessarily may occur next to the first part. Kiril the young priest of the monastery besides the language barriers, because of his vow of silence, accidently finds himself involved right in the center of the drama. It is this moment which complicates and changes his life. Living that drama, something very strange happens to him. Fighting with his monk consciousness and part of the feelings of which he belongs, in the effort to protect Zamira, the Albanian girl, from the angry villagers, Kiril falls deeply in love with her. His purity is not only in his face, but in his soul. The miracle happens, the vow of silence is over, Kiril and Zamira free like two birds. But it is not the definitive outcome. This section of the film called "Words" ends with the death of Zamira and the image of an uncertain and lost Kiril. The involvement of Zamira and Alexander later is left deliberately unexplained and is part of Manchevski's taste for ambiguity. But he is realistic in what his characters, Zamira and Alex are going to face, as a consequence of collective hate. Alex has experienced the horrible face of war in different countries. This experience seems to come to an end after he witnessed the Bosnian war, overwhelming his view about life. For him "peace is an exception, not a rule".

We find that hate is an organic part of those small communities; it comes from the dark of the centuries, an unwritten law dictated by the history itself. It is not only the love for his former sweetheart, Hana, the Albanian woman, the reason for Alex's self sacrifice to save her daughter's life. In the film he is the only one sensing the absurdity of that division. The solitary love nothing can change in that reality, it is like a fading voice in a desert. This is the third episode called "Pictures". Alex, played by Sade Serbedzija in this part is a magnificent presence.

Manchevski does not see any other end, besides the tragic one. He leaves to the audience the rest, sharing the horror, the absurdity and the impossibility to change anything in that picture. If we switch the nationality of any of the personages from one to the other, we most probably will have the same scenario. This is what makes Manchevski's film "one of the best and most impassionate films at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival."