Before The Rain

Before The Rain (1994)

a film by Milcho Manchevski

I can't stop being surprised by the contradictory feelings and ideas that this movie produced me. For being a good movie I was surprised to see so many beautiful landscapes contrasted with tacky image treatment, so many memorable moments followed by weak acting, and so many emotional peaks in the middle of superfluous takes. The power of this story, transmitted in a brilliant way by most of the images, by the music and by the emotional load of its content was almost spoiled by stereotypical melodrama.

This movie is composed of three -tragic- stories. In the first one an Albanian girl looks for refuge at a monastery in the middle of vendetta that aims to her as the assassin of a man in a Macedonian village. In the second one a British photographer has to decide between her husband, a boring wealthy man and her lover, a war photographer decided to return to his home town in Macedonia. And the third story is the story of the war photographer returning to his village after a successful career and seventeen out of his homeland.

This movie is valuable as a testimony of the brutal and irrational nature of violence. It was release in the advent of the war in the Balkans and it was quite a surprise coming from a new country with no tradition in cinema. The director certainly uses very powerful resources as the music and the beautiful landscapes to emphasize the already powerful story of violence and division lived in the Balkans.

This film has been praised by its originality and its treatment of interrelated story lines, and it is certainly original, but the quality of the story lines was too inhomogeneous to keep the unity of the narrative. Particularly I found very poor the scenes in London and in a common feature with Beautiful People, the desire of bringing the drama of the conflict and irrational violence in the form of unexpected tragedy in another country -the scene of the restaurant shooting- seems detached from the main story and was hardly complementing the rest of the film. I take the great casting and the untouched landscapes as a souvenir from this movie, I keep the emotions that the irrational violence shown in the screen produces, but I fear what I'm going to remember are the parts of the film that seem as weakly composed as a collage of newspaper cuts only glued with water.