(Editor’s note: some idiot completely forgot to send out the announcement about the film despite watching it himself and writing it up and all that jazz. So if you want to know why there are two different dates on the main page for this film, that’s why!)
This week’s film was a haunting one out of Macedonia – 1994’s Before The Rain, directed by Milcho Manchevski. About the same time that Quentin Tarantino was making non-linear films, Manchevski upped the ante by making a deliberately anti-linear film. So let’s dive in.
The Castle Aaaaargggh! Our quest is at an end!
Before The Rain is broken into three segments. The first, “Words”, takes place largely at a idyllic lakeside monastery in Macedonia (I originally figured it was seaside, but as Macedonia has no coastline…) during the early years of the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s. At the time of the film, war has not yet spread to Macedonia. In fact, Macedonia declared independence relatively early on in the conflicts (September 25th, 1991) and was the only former Yugoslav republic to gain independence without conflict. Still, tensions between ethnic Albanians and Macedonians, who lived side-by-side but were separated by religious and ethnic differences, would eventually boil over into an Albanian insurgency in 2001, years after Before The Rain was made, yet nonetheless adroitly presaged therein.
But Bill, how can we get Eddie Van Halen if we don’t have a triumphant video?
But, back to the narrative. In the monastery lives young Father Kiril, who has taken a vow of silence. One night he is surprised to discover a refugee in his bedroom – a teenaged Albanian girl named Zamira. Kiril is about to reveal her presence to the elder monks, but has a change of heart. The next day a group of well-armed local Macedonians come around to the monastery and demand to search for a girl who is accused of having killed a local shepherd. The monks (including Kiril with a head-shake) deny that they are harboring anybody, and the Macedonians’ search somehow turns up empty. Intercut with these scenes are those of a Macedonian funeral, and a lone woman standing on a nearby hill and crying.
TFW you realize that everybody is missing the point of Citizen Kane but you don’t have time to explain it before you bleed out
It is not long, however, before Zamira is discovered in Kiril’s room by the other monks, and for his role in lying about her presence, he is dismissed from the monastery. He plans to walk with Zamira to the capital city of Skopje to get assistance from a family member, but an Albanian search party consisting largely of Zamira’s family comes across them, and when Zamira resists returning home with them, her own family shoots her dead. So ends “Words”.
I breathe in deep before/I spread those photos out on the office floor
The second segment of the film, “Faces”, takes place in London. Our main character is Anne, a photo editor at an unnamed publication, who seems to specialize in war photography coming out of the former Yugoslavia. Amongst the images that she is going over on the day that we meet her is a set of photographs of Kiril kneeling over the dead body of Zamira, photos taken by her correspondent in Macedonia. Astute viewers will recognize her, however, as the woman crying on the hill at the Macedonian funeral from “Words”, which seems a bit odd. Later that day, her Macedonian correspondent Alexander unexpectedly shows up at the office in London to resign his position, and we learn that he and Anne are having an affair. Astute viewers will recognize Alexander as the man in the grave in the Macedonian funeral, and will now be seriously trying to figure out the timeline of the film.
I sentence you to be exposed before your peers
This graffiti in London, echoing a phrase that has already been used by a monk in “Words”, comes around to assure us that this film is anti-linear.
Kind of a May-октябрь romance
Meanwhile, Alexander tells Anne that he is returning to Macedonia, and he wants her to come with him. He has bought her a plane ticket, but he is already resolved to the idea that she won’t in fact be following along. Instead, Anne decides to meet in a restaurant with her husband to tell him that she wants a divorce. Their discussion is constantly interrupted by a squabble between a waiter and a drunken, seemingly Eastern European customer, and when things eventually come to a head with the customer barging back into the restaurant with a firearm and shooting the whole place up, Anne’s husband is killed. So ends “Faces”.
This is my camera/This is my gun/I shoot one for money/The other for fun
The third segment of the film, “Pictures”, opens with Alexander’s return to his home village in Macedonia after 16 years away. Alexander has a bit of difficulty being accepted by his former community, perhaps even his family, after his long absence. Nonetheless, he hopes to rekindle a relationship with a former lover who has recently been left widowed with a teenaged daughter Zamira. One would note that, although it is never expressly mentioned, the timeframe of Alexander’s absence and Zamira’s apparent age leave open the slightest of possibilities that Alexander is in fact her father.
Jara sang, his song a weapon, in the hands of love
On a few occasions, Alexander retreats to a picturesque family sheepfold. While Anne is trying to reach him from London without success, he is having difficulty fitting back in. Finally, however, the dam breaks when a local shepherd is badly wounded in a stabbing, and from his possible deathbed names Zamira as the perpetrator.
I’m not martyr. I’m soldier… and realist.
When Alexander finds his family holding Zamira captive at the sheepfold, he wrests her from them, and begins escorting her away. He has taken a side, and he has taken it against his family. He is threatened by them, and as he is leading Zamira away, they threaten to shoot him. “Shoot, then!” he says, and although Zamira escapes, Alexander is shot dead. So ends “Pictures”.
I would argue that the film, however, never properly ends. As you can see, important elements of the film are strewn about with no regard for a linear timeline. This isn’t an accident, or sloppy editing. Instead, the three segments of the film are woven together in an anti-linear fashion where time never dies, and where the circle is not round. Events beget themselves. All is tied together; all is inevitable. It cannot be broken out of.
Seven years after the release of this film, isolated incidents of the type depicted here in Before The Rain reverberated into an insurgency and civil war in Macedonia. We can assume that events begat themselves. All was tied together; all was inevitable. Manchevski saw it nearly a decade earlier and warned us with the subtlest yet most striking language he knew. But it could not be broken out of.
Cinema 1544: The As-Official-As-It-Gets Site 