34th Hall of Fame

It was the appropriation I didn't like. Religious themes are fine. I didn't like how the one guy was always rattling on about how the other religions were so terrible and were "the enemy" or whatever.

In I Confess, Montgomery Clift is a priest who has been told about a murder, which adds to the tension. No one actually says how awful another religion is. It's about the morality of a Catholic priest and his confidentiality of the confessional.

I know why I feel that way towards basically lambasting others' views on religion and saying yours is the better version. It's a sore spot for me.

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I destroyed the dastardly dairy dame! I made mad milk maid mulch!

I hate insomnia. Oh yeah. Last year I had four cases of it, and each time it lasted three months.

It's all cool and I believe we all have different takes on things, so I'm just asking out of curiosity: You said, "I didn't like how the one guy was always rattling on about how the other religions were so terrible and were "the enemy" or whatever."

That's how the film wants us to feel, we're not suppose to like the missionaries with their 'my religion is the only right way attitudes', we're suppose to see that their actions aren't pure but self righteous and self promoting. But like I said if that's outside of your comfort zone, I can dig it. No worries

Oh yeah there was that. It was off-putting, although that's not my sole issue with the film. I can see that it was the purpose of how the characters were written. They still got on my nerves. I've faced that sort of religious scrutiny in the past personally so it rather rubs me wrong. I don't feel negatively that I watched it. I just feel negatively towards the movie. At least now I know I needn't watch it again.

That's cool Pants, thanks for explaining

I'm not certain, but I thought appropriation meant sort of the opposite.

I'm not sure if you're referencing what I said or Pants?

I 'think' Pants might have meant that the half Native American 'Indian' played by Tom Berringer appropriated the indigenous native tribes culture when he adopted their style of dress and living. I could be totally wrong about that. But to address that point...the film is saying Tom Berringer's character starts off as not caring about the indigenous people but was going to drop a bomb on them, then he had an epiphany about his own lack of ties to his tribe after the missionary pleaded with him not to hurt the indigenous people on the grounds that he had something in common with them as a member of a native American tribe that had suffered at the hands of society. So with that in mind he doesn't appropriate their culture, instead he connects to his own roots of living at one with nature. I guess I'm the only one who liked the movie.

I just watched Past Lives. It's a perfectly solid movie. I really like it. Every actor and actress is great and the story is smooth. I don't consider it a favorite necessarily though I am quite happy I watched it. There's nothing to dislike at all. I can see why people were gushing about this so early in the Hall of Fame line up. It's such a good film. Past Lives is easily deserved of any praise it gets.

I looked it up, and "appropriation" is when one takes another's work and uses it without the person's permission, so I guess I used it wrong. My bad. I'm not sure what the word I want is then. What I'm trying to say is the act of replacing someone's culture or religion with one's own with the only motive being that the current culture or religion isn't the replacer's. I don't know if this makes sense...

I think the question of whether Lewis Moon is appropriating the culture of the Niaruna or assimilating into it is an interesting one. (In the context of this conversation, I'm taking cultural appropriation to mean the inappropriate "costuming" in someone else's culture).

When I wrote in my review that I wish Lewis had been given more story time, this is a big part of what I meant. I myself was never sure watching the movie whether he genuinely felt that he had become a part of the Niaruna, or if he was mainly using them as a proxy for his own lost culture and enjoying the shift in status from loser drunk to demigod.

What complicates the question even further is the fact that the tribe has a misconception about Lewis---that he is one of their gods---and he does not take any steps to correct this misconception, which gives him high status in the tribe. This is unquestionably an abuse of power, and I wonder how much you can say someone fully belongs to a group if they are actively deceiving that group about their identity while using that deception to wield political and social power within the group.

I understand the interest in the story of the missionaries, but I found the question of Lewis's identity a more interesting plot element. For example, the sequence where he encounters Daryl Hannah's character and engages in gentle romantic touching and kissing, only to then work out his sexual frustration by sexually assaulting Prini seems to imply that he's still holding onto ideas about who can and who cannot be abused in that way.

I do think that his story fits in with all the other subplots, in the sense that coming to a different cultural group with selfish intentions is never going to end well. Even if we can sympathize with Lewis and his lost sense of self, there's no question that he is, in his own way, using the tribe to serve his own interests.

I think the word I wanted is "coercion"? It's pretty much forcing someone to alter his actions to match what someone else desires. There's also the hard-to-spell proselytism, which is more specific to what I meant except I never heard that word until now.

Before the Rain (1994)
Writer/Director: Milcho Manchevski
Key cast: Rade Serbedzija, Katrin Cartlidge





Before the Rain announces itself as “a tale in three parts.”

Part 1, “Words,” takes place in Northern Macedonia, where Orthodox Christians are hunting down a young Albanian Muslim woman who they believe murdered a sheepherder in their village. She is shielded by a young monk, who has taken a vow of silence. They try to slip away together.

Part 2, “Faces,” transports us to crowded, noisy London, where Pulitzer-winning war photographer Aleksander (Rade Serbedzija) and his editor Anne (Katrin Cartlidge) are discussing their future together. He’s homesick to return to his native Macedonia, which he left 16 years ago, and wants her to leave with him that night. She instead must meet her husband to ask for a divorce.

Part 3, “Pictures,” follows photographer Aleksander’s return to a Macedonia he no longer recognizes. In trying to re-acquaint himself with an Albanian woman he cared for in school, he comes face to face with the ever-more corrosive animosity between Christian and Muslim.

And tragedy follows at every turn.

Writer/Director Milcho Manchevski begins many scenes with pastoral vistas: villages spread out on a carpet of rolling hills; mountain scapes lit by brilliant, super large moonrises and stunning, bright sunsets; long, winding roads disappearing into the horizon. But as we get closer and details emerge, we see the devastation, the decay, and always the hostile faces glaring from all corners in suspicion. The tension is palpable, the air heavy with the dread of impending tragedy.

In Part 2, Aleksander and Anne are kissing passionately in the back seat of a taxi. We catch glimpses of them from outside, through the shadows and reflections of urban London that play along the window. This is the way Manchevski has chosen to tell his tale: showing you a quivering patchwork, alternating moments of clarity and obscurity. His tale in three parts requires you to knit together your own understanding from the tatters of words, faces, and pictures he arrays before you. Yet, nothing will prepare you for that moment when suddenly everything snaps into sharp and agonizing focus.

While set in Macedonia, Manchevski is reaching for universal themes. The dialog is rich with insights that reflect the futility of trying to make a difference in a world gone mad. During that taxi ride, we hear how weary Aleksander is of documenting wars across the globe. “It’s important to take sides,” Anne contends. “Take sides?” he says. “I don’t want to be on the same side with any of them.” Anne protests: “I meant takes sides against war.” He shrugs it off: “As if it matters.”

Rade Serbedzija, who I recognize mostly as the stereotypical foreign-sounding bad guy in Hollywood thrillers like Air Force One Down and Taken 2, gives an effortless performance as the weary traveler who tries so desperately to recapture the imagined safety of his youth. Also give a round of applause to Manchevski, who took a chance in his feature film debut to hang his thesis on a stylish plot device.

Indeed, how many times will you need to rewatch Before the Rain until you fit together all the pieces to your personal satisfaction? How about that line of dialog, of graffiti, that repeats in each part: “Time never dies. The circle is not round.” And the symbolism of the rain, always on the way, and which arrives only to divide the chronology at that moment when time shatters. It may just leave you too distraught to revisit again.

Those of us who live in comfortable circumstances in Western countries will be tempted to dissect the dialog, the characters, the action, trying to understand the hatred that divides these two communities. But don’t look here for enlightenment. Manchevski is not trying to explain or excuse, to “take sides.” He is showing you a world where the never-ending suspicion, the animosities, the compulsions for perceived retribution are so long buried in a troubled past that neither Christian nor Muslim can explain any longer why they hate each other – only that they do.

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Scarecrow: I haven't got a brain ... only straw. Dorothy: How can you talk if you haven't got a brain? Scarecrow: I don't know. But some people without brains do an awful lot of talking, don't they? Dorothy: Yes, I guess you're right.

Yes, I think how you interpret Lewis Moon is the key to unpacking what Babenco has set out to say. I seem to have an idiosyncratic view on it. It boils down to that scene where Moon and Quarrier are watching the shaman dance around his sick kinsmen, with motions that imply he is trying to wipe the illness from their bodies. It seems almost a parody of faith healers. Moon and Quarrier know this is futile. That's followed by the discussion where Quarrier learns of the confusion regarding the name "Jesus.":

Quarrier: “So I taught them that Jesus was their evil spirit?”

Moon: “Ah, Jesus, Kisu, What’s the difference? It’s all hocus-pocus, isn’t it Martin?”

And that line can't be some random inclusion. It seems to me to represent a more universal rejection of any sort of religion. Yes, here the missionaries are the catalyst for the Niaruna's tragedy. But nothing was going to save them from their fate -- not the Western religion, not even their own religion. "It's all just hocus pocus."

Movies that rely on the familiar "missionary as agent of tragedy" are very common. At Play in the Fields of the Lord feels to me like it is trying to be more expansive than that.

I'm thirteen minutes into People's Joker. I thought I was thirty minutes into it... I don't understand what I'm watching. So he thinks he's a woman? I have a lot of misgivings I really shouldn't go into here (vis I tried that in the Shoutbox and it went poorly) and I don't know that I'm going to not hate this movie. I'm taking a small break and will resume the, uh, thing in a few minutes. I hate how they bleep out his name...

Addendum; I'm going to resume it this evening so we'll see how it ends. I will broaden my mind and approach it more openly. This subject matter, uh, anyway...

Two very contrary themes dominate Before the Rain - love, and the act of killing other human beings. If I cast my mind back to the years in which this movie was made, to the land that was once known simply as Yugoslavia, I remember wars and genocide - a constant refrain from my television when international news reached my ears. When Soviet control of Yugoslavia weakened from 1991 onwards ethnic divisions bubbled to the surface, and the breakup of the nation into smaller states signalled the beginning of a decade of murder and killing on a scale which horrified the world. Usually, it was Slavic Christians set against a Muslim minority - and that's where the first story of three interrelated tales in this film begins. An orthodox Christian monk, Kiril (Grégoire Colin) finds a young woman/girl sequestered in his room at the monastery he lives in - she's hiding from a group of men who are out for blood. Later, in London, we catch up with a journalistic agent, Anne (Katrin Cartlidge), struggling to sort out a complex love life that includes Macedonian war photographer Aleksandar (Rade Šerbedžija) - this after discovering that she's pregnant. In the final story Aleksandar returns to his Macedonian homeland and finds that many changes have taken place in his absence. Friends have become enemies and even the children carry guns - suspicion, paranoia, hatred and violence abound.

From our very entrance into the world of Before the Rain Milcho Manchevski and cinematographer Manuel Teran make the most of both Macedonia's rugged terrain (this was actually the very first film ever made in the newly independent nation of the Republic of North Macedonia) and the country's cultural heritage. In the background there's a beautiful 14th Century monastery that works as the location of most of the events in the film's first chapter. Interiors, while not filmed at the same location, are nonetheless equally steeped in historic beauty and religious iconography. "With a shriek birds flee across the black sky, people are silent, my blood aches from waiting" - words from Meša Selimović, one of Yugoslavia's great writers, set the stage for what is a human drama writ large backgrounded against the rolling hills, rural life and the sea. Early on a character, a priest, mentions that "Time never dies. The circle is not round," and this will be key to the events we witness in the film, for if you closely follow the events in the movie they don't make sense chronologically, but work in a way that's been compared the the drawings of M.C. Escher - skewed into an illusion of time where there's no entry point into the story without a prior event being a precursor to what we're seeing. A never-ending cycle.

Throughout the film love and hate continually cohabit together - even during a scene in a London restaurant, where we'd hardly expect any incursion from Balkans-inspired terror or death, there exists an unlikely interloper ready to bring violence and bloodshed. Manchevski is that intent on maintaining that particular status quo throughout without let-up. It's the duality which sits at the very core of his film, and exists within the hearts of a population stirred by the upheavals set in motion by the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe during this era. At first, I watched the characters carrying guns in Macedonia and simply couldn't understand why they'd choose to live their lives almost foaming at the mouth, constantly hungry for some kind of vengeance purporting to this or that imagined slight. But if we're honest with ourselves - the capacity exists within nearly every human being conditioned to look on any group as an "other", and live with constant recollections regarding the evil deeds these "others" have committed against their people. I was really struck though, by the looks on these people's faces - the phobia, bitterness, paranoia, misery and rage is really captured by Manuel Teran's camera.

This was a breakthrough for actor Rade Šerbedžija - having not seen this film when it was released, I only noticed him later on because of his increased visibility - but he has a screen presence which is very commanding and draws you in. He plays Aleksandar in a free-wheeling, child-like manner - lots of movement, posing, expression and confidence. He travels back from London to his Macedonian home, and seems determined to carry on with business as usual despite the fact that this is an extraordinarily dangerous place - as such, without projecting a sense of menace he really sticks out. Earlier on we see Grégoire Colin play his role in a very different manner - reserved, inhibited and nervous, he seems to try and not be noticed. The timidity of youth, mixed with a sense that this is another character not inflicted with the passionate hatred most of his countrymen display so eagerly. Both characters end up in the same position, with results that both differ and mirror each other. Katrin Cartlidge has a role to play as the outsider and a witness who has been touched by the madness, showing us her sense of how confused, unsure and conflicted her life has become as a result. All three have obvious commitment and a deep understanding of their roles, contrasting with the lack of humanity surrounding them - supporting the film with sure-footed ability and talent, which especially goes for Šerbedžija.

Musically, Manchevski has gained the services of Macedonian music group Anastasia, whose strains are a blend of that of the Byzantine past, Eastern Orthodox Church music and ethnic Macedonian rhythms. What more could you ask for as far as authenticity goes, and a real taste of the enveloping feel for the place we're visiting? It's a little unusual and not at all what I'm used to, with chanting and various musical instruments coming to the fore that I never usually hear from in any film score. It invokes a certain spirituality and religiosity to the movie, which for me personally added a certain note of sadness to proceedings. It gave the movie a genuine soul, and there's something particularly mournful about that, considering what the film is about. In a world when there's a lot of soulless cinematic input, something which imbues the images we're watching with cultural sentiment and probably an unfeigned emotional response for the artist's contributing makes a difference. I thought the score was another remarkable part of the package we get when it comes to this film - not because it's the kind of music I'd listen to by itself, but because of the connection it had to Macedonia and the people I was watching.

When you add it all together, there's a lot to like regarding Before the Rain - as much as it loses it's flavour and momentum during the segment that takes part in London. It gave me a very direct sense of what life is like in a society that has become unmoored and beset by ethnic hatred, and how much more pain our natural proclivity to love each other causes ordinary people in those circumstances. This is the kind of movie that gifts viewers with not only it's resonant themes and emotional punch, but also unique locations that have been rarely seen and music that could have no better reverberance than what Anastasia gives to it. That's a strong combination worthy of our applause, and I often had a sense that I was watching documentary reality - my heart skipping beats when life and death are on the line. I think you really have to be willing to step outside of your own cultural boundaries if you're to fully accept life in Macedonia - but of course there are aspects to what was going on in the Balkans during those days that can't ever be accepted. It cast a dark shadow back then, and a dark shadow over Before the Rain - but not before helping to shine a light on our terrible ability to hate, despite our incredible ability to love each other.

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Those are all good points and I have to say I do agree with what you wrote, especially after reading TheManBehindTheCurtain's thoughts on Lewis Moon (Tom Berringer). I had forgot about the indigenous people mistaking Moon for some kind of spirit god and I didn't remember that Moon had used that to obtain privileged status in the tribe. I've only seen At Play in the Fields of the Lord one time back in December which is now almost four months and 100+ movies ago!...My old memory just isn't that good But after reading yours and Curtain's post I can remember now that Moon was yet another user and abuser of the Amazonian people, everyone was in the movie in way or another.

Oh geez, that puts me in a real bind. As host I have to say we need to watch the entire movie. It's totally cool if you hate a nom, but you got to watch it all, it's only fair to the person who nominated it. Look at it this way, there's not another movie like People's Joker and you will then know how it ends. So please finish watching the movie...and post back and let us know you did watch it.

So I'm not going to try to change your opinion. But to share my own experience: I was also at sea in the beginning, for many reasons. I also wrote in my notes as I was watching: "What's the deal with bleeping out his name?" Later, after the transition, the name is no longer bleeped, but she is now known as Vera. Why? I did some research. It's common to refer to the pre-transition name as the "deadname" left behind. When I stumbled on this in my research, the bleeping became clear, and it caused a grin as I realized how the bleeping was a clever device to convey the person's experience.

It would be pretentious of someone like me to claim I came away with an understanding of what trans people experience, any more than I can claim to know what it's like to be in 1960s Milan or current day Tehran. However, I can claim to have learned more about the experience of all the characters in these films, and learning about people and culture and experience beyond my own is one of the reasons I'm a film addict. And another reason why I'm pleased to have been invited to this HoF, which has exposed me to a lot of cinema that has escaped me.

Okay I can do that. I remember about where I left off.

That is interesting. I learned something new about it.