The Macedonian director Milcho Manchevski is a favourite son in Venice. In 1994, he came here and lifted the festival's big prize, the Golden Lion, with his debut film Before the Rain, a stern essay on the Balkan conflict. Since then, he has spent much of his time storming off films he was due to direct: Three Kings, Ravenous and Burn Hollywood Burn. Finally, his long-awaited second film is here, and it's a weird one. Dust looks like a Western, but it is mostly set 100 years ago in the hills of Macedonia, where local freedom fighters try to resist Turkish invaders. Two American cowboy brothers assist their efforts. The older, Luke (David Wenham), is there as a mercenary, having lost the woman he loves to his brother Elijah (Joseph Fiennes). Cut to modern-day New York, where a burglar (Adrian Lester) has broken into the apartment of an old woman (Rosemary Murphy) born into this ancient conflict. Holding him at gunpoint, she promises him her life savings if only he will listen to Luke and Elijah's story.

Frankly, Dust is a mess. Manchevski vainly seeks to impose the conventions of a Western on a Balkan story, and the result jars. It's as if he has studied lots of Westerns, but failed utterly to understand their spirit. The casting is eccentric: Fiennes is an odd choice to play a cowboy, and his role seems to have been cut severely. The script is riddled with cliches that would have been swiftly excised from real Westerns. As reported on the news pages yesterday, Dust is brutal (decapitations and severed limbs abound), and its politics suspect: it asserts that while killing for gold may be wrong, killing people you happen to dislike is just fine. It portrays Turks as bloodthirsty and moronic. A sub-standard festival opener.