The Guardian
September 1, 2001
By Peter Bradshaw

Gun-totin' cowboys in Macedonia and murderous Florida teenagers are the highlights of the Venice film festival so far

The opening extravaganza was Milcho Manchevksi's Dust, an ambitious but wearing piece of macho cinema whose special pleading for Macedonian nationalism was topical, if nothing else.

Adrian Lester is a New York burglar who gets beaten up by a feisty, pistol-packin' old lady, Rosemary Murphy. At gunpoint, Lester is forced to listen to her family history. We flash back a century and two brothers in the old American west, Elijah and Luke - Joseph Fiennes and David Wenham - are quarrelling over a woman. Wenham lights out for some new territory: the "wild east", where the Ottoman Empire's cruel functionaries offer huge bounties for the heads of Macedonian rebels. He feels right at home in this brutal world, and finally joins the underdog heroes, just when Elijah comes looking for his brother with murder in his heart.

Putting a modern perspective on the abyss of central European warfare and bloodshed is a shrewd idea; the shoot-out sequences between noble peasants and fez-wearing Turks are unusual to the point of delirium, and Manchevski finds pleasingly cruel twists in juxta-posing the crime and corruption of modern Manhattan with the distant war of Macedonia.

But there is something obtuse and disingenuous in finding this modernity not in the obvious fact of Nato intervention, but in a hip-hop New York city crime scene, where no one knows that this history has real, contemporary meanings and repercussions quite distinct from Manchevski's sentimental fantasy. He gives Macedonian identity an apolitical sheen of stylistic cool, just as Luke and Elijah get to do a sort of glamorous Butch-and-Sundance-in-Bolivia riff. What at first seemed bizarre and striking winds up looking forced and sentimental, and the fact that the three tough-guy Americans are played by two Brits and an Australian only reinforces the sense of ersatz. Joseph Fiennes's cowboy voice sounds like a cockney doing an impression of Dick Van Dyke.