Tribune Excerpts
The following article appeared in the April 2008 Edition of the Macedonian Tribune
Manchevski’s Shadows at the
Santa Barbara International Film Festival
By Diane Sippl
Cinemawithoutborders
Santa Barbara, Feb. 1 – Red carpets ribboned through Santa Barbara for its International Film Festival, spanning ooohs and ahhs, yelps and squeals for Julie Christie, Cate Blanchett, Javier Bardem, Ryan Gosling, Tommy Lee Jones and Angelina Jolie, in that order. And, stars shone brightly as well on the faux black-sky ceiling of the 2,000-seat Arlington Theater, walled with real gold and amber lanterns and facades of the Old Spanish mission town that the city once was.
This site for the endless tributes was
nearly as packed for a new film from
Kazakhstan by Sergie Bodrov, Mongol.
A glorious old-style action film devoid of
character development heart-felt conflict
(even with narration delivered in firstperson
voice-over), it offered plenty of
blood and bodies and land-and-skyscapes,
rough-hewn exotica when compared to, for
instance, a glittering Zhang Yimou palace
epic.
Yet in smaller theaters and some uniquely pleasant mid-size venues (the city offers several, patch-worked through its downtown), very astute and committed cineastes streamed into half a dozen new films designated as “eastern Bloc” in the catalog and filled the houses. I never saw so little popcorn (nor food or drink of any kind) consumed in movie theaters (though it was generally available) or heard so much conversation in the lobbies afterward.
At this mid-fest writing moment, I haven’t seen all of the films (Faith Akins’s The Edge of Heaven is yet to come and gaspingly anticipated), but so far Alexander Sokurov’s eloquently enigmatic Alexandra, Andrei Zvyagintsev’s striking end engrossing The Banishment, and Milcho Manchevski’s singularly compelling Shadows are enough to call any festival a success.
Together they bring an aesthetic and socially conscious edge to this 21-day event that is perhaps not so pronounced in any other particular segment of the program. And a crime it shall be if they don’t soon make it into local art-house theaters across our country. If only because it takes so long to encounter a new work by him, even though he now lives and works in the US (heading the directing department at NYU’s Tisch School of Arts’ graduate program), this review will focus on the latest by Manchevski.
Following his much feted debut, Before
the Rain (1994), and his second feature, Dust
(2001), writer-director Manchevski has
once again provided us with the perfect
festival film: a visual tale of dramatic
substance, with historical depth and
contemporary thrust, adroitly told with
innovation and élan. And, once again,
Manchevski returns to that place he cannot
leave behind, his beloved Macedonia.
It all begins, at least the film itself, with a crash. It looks like a fatal car accident. But Lazar Perkov – his friends call him Lucky –miraculously survives it, or so he thinks. After a year of convalescing, he returns from his parents’ villa in the lakes region to his apartment in Skopie, the capital, and his position at the hospital where he is a physician.
Sad that his wife has remained behind with their little boy, and she is flirting with someone, at that, he feels even more uneasy because his forgetfulness, nightmares and absent-mindedness tell him his recovery is not yet complete. And there are those strange faces: an old man taking care of a baby, a perhaps even older lady tattooed with a cross between her eyebrows and muttering an ancient dialect, and then a mesmerizing young woman who holds a secret.
Lazar manages to find someone to decipher the words of the old woman, Kalina, who is there waiting for him on his couch when he arrives home at night, sometimes with an eerie wolf. “Return what’s not yours. Have respect” is what she presses urgently. But, what has he stolen? Without knowing this, how could he possibly return it? The linguist who translated the words notes the Biblical connection of Lazar’s name to the story of Lazarus and by coincidence, the young woman he meets in that offi ce, Menka, is the survivor of a suicide by hanging – or is she?
Perhaps it’s not by chance that the old man, Gerasim, a refugee, turns up on a gurney in the hospital. His brother nailed a spike into his heel before he placed him in the coffi n to keep him from wandering after death. Yet there he is, dying once again, leaving behind the unbaptized baby in a limbo not unnoticed by Kalina, herself a long-ago displaced Aegean Macedonian.
The repetition of their violent deaths in the story haunts Lazar all the while these people draw his compassion and even compel his attraction, in the case of Menka. But, Lazar is consumed with the overbearing presence of his mother, a highly successful doctor and ambitious woman who once scavenged a box of old bones from the sacred cemetery when she needed them for her anatomy class.
“It’s not a real grave,” she rationalized
in her hometown of Gluvovo. Yet an
early scene in the film feels like part
urban legend and part folk tale as local
Macedonians pull up, turning off their car
stereos and cell phones to celebrate the
Night of the Dead. In a sprawling cemetery
under a black sky, myriad candles light the
graves where visitors lay plates of food or
pour drinks for their deceased and spend
the night.
