The background of the story is the civil war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The film does not show grand war scenes, but shows the cruelty of war and the distortion of people's hearts by capturing the life changes of ordinary people under the cloud of war. This is the brilliance of the film—the narrative of the grand scene is not difficult, but it is a pile of money, props, and special effects. The difficulty is to start with the subtleties and map the grand historical panorama by splicing the emotions of ordinary people.
The film has a three-stage structure: words, faces, and photos. Different from the three-part movies I used to watch, there is no three-part story of "Psychedelic Train", nor the grotesque perverse of "Pulp Fiction". You have me in the three stories of "Rainbow Down". I have you in me, closely connected. But when you think that you have finally found the three clear time lines of the story, the end of the movie cleverly diverges the starting and ending points you thought you thought, making you unable to draw a complete circle. The cycle of time is broken here, just like a sentence repeated in the film: time is no longer, the circle is not round.
In the process of watching the film, many questions have always puzzled me: Is the photographer the uncle of the young monk? Was the call from Macedonia that the female reporter received from a young monk? Was the man who shot the female reporter’s husband a Macedonian? Are the photos of Algerian girls and young monks taken by photographers? Is the girl the child of the photographer and first love? Until the end of the film, the questions in my mind are still like circles without nodes. The director seems to tell us implicitly: Does it matter? Even if it is, it is only to achieve narrative completion in the movie, which is no different from war. Why not try to elevate the relationship and plot of these characters from a seemingly individual, independent, and accidental level to a universal, connected, and inevitable level?
Although there are no scenes of fighting, there are people falling to the ground at the end of each paragraph-an Albanian girl, a female reporter's husband, and a Macedonian photographer. They did not die on the battlefield, but they did not escape the shadow of death caused by the war. This shadow soaks in the blood of everyone who has experienced war. This shadow is unconsciously, you bring it to others, or to you, or to yourself, just like a time bomb tied up that cannot escape and explodes at any time.
The three stories are full of love-between lovers, between relatives, between brothers, and even transcend ethnic and religious fraternity, but none of these loves can transcend war. With just one bullet, the fruits of love are gone. What is chilling is that the shooter is the relative and brother of the deceased-war can bypass love and devour reason. At the end of the film, I saw the photographer lying in a pool of blood. The heavy rain that had been brewing for a long time fell on him, and the blood that overflowed from the wound was flowing in all directions with the rain. The Albanian girl ran towards the distant church under the cover of the photographer. The sky was clear. It seemed that the heavy rain had washed away the war and death, hoping to reappear. However, the first story of the film clearly tells us that the girl finally fell under the gun of her grandfather. The torrential rain washes only blood stains, and cannot wash away the shadows on people's hearts.
War is a wound that love can never overcome.
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