The London Times
Monday, September 3, 2001
By James Christopher
This year's Venice Film Festival got off to a surreal start, and it wasn't simply the opening film
Having been arrested less than 12 hours after my arrival at the Venice Film Festival, I’ve first-hand experience of the local security. No wonder Nicole Kidman likes coming here. The carabinieri take very good care of their clients. They whisk them around the Lido with ruthless efficiency to the eternal exasperation of the paparazzi.
My journey to the local clink was equally brisk, if not quite so glamorous, but then neither was the charge sheet. A combination of my dire Italian and a lost bag led me to asking a well-known pasta dish if he had stolen my cell phone. Officer Carbonara was not amused.
It wasn’t quite as surreal a start to the festivities as the opening film, Dust, but then not much is. Milcho Manchevski’s second movie is an insane spaghetti western set in Macedonia at the turn of the last century.
His first, Before the Rain, won the Golden Lion here in 1994, but despite the tropical squalls sweeping over Venice, lightning is unlikely to strike twice. Two American cowboys, brothers in fact, suffering what appears to be terminal lockjaw, gallop up and down the Macedonian mountains trying to kill each other for the love of a woman (left in America) who appears in the movie for all of five minutes.
Joseph Fiennes and Australian hunk David Wenham play these mad anachronistic romantics as if their lives depended on the terseness of their southern drawls. Cain and Abel had friskier conversations. Wenham is the “adulterer”; Fiennes a sort of biblical avenger. They stare moodily down the barrels of their guns, or blunder in and out of favour with the warring locals. Squads of Turks, Greeks and Albanian paramilitaries charge from hilltop to hilltop butchering each other, but mostly laying waste to humble Macedonian peasants.
If that’s not confusing enough the story is related piecemeal by a dying woman who holds Adrian Lester’s scuzzy thief in her seedy New York flat at gunpoint. Lester needs money fast. Rosemary Murphy’s Angela needs an ear; willing, or unwilling, it hardly matters. Like Titanic the whole thing takes on a misty rose-tinted view of the past. And by uncomfortable proxy, the present Balkan crisis.
There is some genius to Manchevski’s tinkerings. Even a touch of epic. He managed to shoot his eastern western during a particularly sticky period of the current Balkan crisis. But he plays fast and dangerously loose with current fears and prejudices. As the British producer Chris Auty intimated at the press conference, the Balkans is Europe’s Vietnam — a truly scary thought — yet the film blindly makes assumptions about ancient Balkan grudges which wouldn’t look amiss in a Mel Brooks film.
Manchevski hits important nerves but his politics, like his twin stories, are all over the place. True, Dust is not a piece of “realist” cinema, but having placed his film in the teeth of a deadly serious conflict can he really shrug off the responsibility?
