In June of this year, the Shanghai Film Festival invited the famous Macedonian director Mirko Manchevsky to serve as the jury of the competition unit, and his three works-"A Rainstorm Is Coming", "Mothers" and "Dust" will also be featured in the film Join the show during the festival. For some reasons, "Heavy Rain is Coming" has only been released on DVD so far, and HD media has never appeared. The other two are extremely rare. Therefore, this time I can see three masterpieces on the big screen at the same time. Same as usual.
"A Rainstorm is Coming" is Manchevsky's debut feature film. Although he did not have any previous experience in independent feature film shooting, Manchevsky completed this work with amazing control and won the Golden Lion Award at the 1994 Venice Film Festival (with Cai Mingliang’s "Long Live Love" 》Share) and the Fabian International Film Critics Award and many other awards. Because of its subversive narrative techniques and deep connotation, the film is even hailed as one of the greatest debuts in history.
The film is divided into three parts: "speech", "face" and "photo". The first and third parts take place in different villages in Macedonia, and the second part takes place in the United Kingdom. At first glance, each part follows the classic "three-in-one" principle, mixing elements of emotion and violence; although the three parts occur in different time and space, they appear to be connected end to end according to time and logic; At the end of the film, we were surprised to find that the end of the third part and the beginning of the first part were perfectly joined together, making the whole structure of the play a circle.
In fact, in 1994, there were two films that successfully used the "ring structure", one was "A Rainstorm Is Coming", and the other was "Pulp Fiction" which was well-known and won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. . Although the two works seem similar on the surface, there are still very obvious differences between the two works: The whole film of "Pulp Fiction" can be described as fragmented, and the timing of more than a dozen plots was disrupted and reorganized by Quentin Tarantino. The use of popular culture and extreme exaggeration of violence all have comprehensive and obvious post-modern characteristics; "A Rainstorm is Coming" interprets the "three-stage" structure of the traditional classics by transforming (rather than subverting) the traditional classic "three-stage" structure. Ji's views on time and violence tell the tragic fate of nations and countries. Although they have postmodern characteristics, their core is purely realist.
Taking a closer look, the film is not a flashback in the traditional sense, nor is it simply shuffling the order and then collage. It is a magical insertion of some things that cannot happen or appear in the current time and space in the plot (and Usually details), in order to subvert the audience's perception of time. For example, in the first part of the film ("Speech"), a female photographer (played by the late actress Caitlin Kateliji) mourns the dead Alexander (played by Rad Shebodzga) in a black veil. In the second part ("Face"), Alexander reappears in the real life of a female reporter. From the traditional narrative approach, this means that the film enters a flashback, that is, the actual time of the second part should be before the first part. But then, the female reporter saw in the office the girl shot by her relatives at the end of the first part and the photo of the young priest sitting on the sidelines, which means that the second part must have happened after the first part.
Although we still cannot know that the entire film will be presented in a "circular structure" from the first two parts, so far we can see that time is not reorganized externally, but internally disordered. In this sense, "Pulp Fiction" and "A Rainstorm Is Coming" demonstrate the skill of screenwriters from different levels, and the two are indeed fundamentally different. Through this "disorder", the director quietly weaves the stories that take place in different time and space , and finally forms a repetitive and endless effect. It is conceivable that because of this "ring", the people in the drama in different time and space will continue to experience pain, separation, and death, and will never be able to escape their own tragedies. The entire nation, country and even the world will also fall into "undeparable"-this is what Talking about the reason why this film must start from the narrative method and the overall structure, it is undoubtedly Manchevsky's ultimate torture of the historical development process and the destiny of mankind.
In some interviews, Mirko Manchevsky also repeatedly mentioned his worries about the current situation and future of his motherland Macedonia. But he confessed frankly that "Heavy Rain" "should not be a prophetic prediction, but should only be a warning." [1] Obviously, he had never thought that his manifestations of conflicts and contradictions would herald Kosovo three years later. War, and the core issue of this war is the issue of nationalism. The only difference is that the protagonists of the Kosovo War are the Serbian and Albanian tribes, while the conflict in "A Rainstorm is Coming" is between the Macedonians and the Albanian tribe. Of course, even if the audience does not have any level of understanding of the Balkan issue, it should not be difficult to understand the meaning of the film, because every character and every look in the film confirms the universal existence of hatred to humans and the outstandingness of the film. , Probably also originated from this.
The recurrence of similar tragedies is, in the final analysis, the consequence of the incompatibility between ancient nations and modern countries, which not only brought deep suffering to the people of the Balkans, but also gave endless creative inspiration to artists in this region. In fact, in the Balkans during this period, the great success of Manchevsky and "Heavy Rain is Coming" is by no means an exception: one year after the film came out, that is, in 1995, the world-class director of Serbia, the neighboring country of Macedonia Emile Kusturica won his second Palme d'Or for "Underground" in one fell swoop, and the film used magical realism to show the eternal life from the Revolutionary War to the civil war in the former Yugoslavia. Interestingly, the Greek film master Theo Angelo Broscha from another Balkan country took "The Gaze of Ulysses" to Cannes in the same year and won the jury award (that is, the second runner-up). The extremely poetic method depicts the current situation of frequent wars in the entire Balkan Peninsula, and it also shows the siege of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Until 2001, Bosnia-Herzegovina director Denis Tanovich won many heavyweight awards such as Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival for his "Borderland" which satirizes the situation on the front lines of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It can be said that in the short period of seven or eight years from the end of the 20th century to the beginning of the 21st century, there have been too many historical works and even master directors on the Balkan Peninsula, but this seems to have become the most absurd film history in the Balkans. Where: The pain, separation and even death of a group of people have become the object of praise from another group. What else can art do? What else can the artist do? What else can we do as viewers? The appearance of these works has drawn a huge question mark for all mankind.
"Time does not pass, the circle is not round", this is the most famous sentence in "The Rainstorm Is Coming". It is the final direction of the film's structure and meaning. The deep expectation of being able to break through the violent circle and escape from the clutches of fate. However, Alexander in the film could not wait until this day. At the end of the film (if there is one), he stares at a withered grass in despair, and sighs on his back, "Heavy rain is coming." The dark cloud rolled into the distance, and no one could escape its envelope. Dou Da's raindrops kept beating on the dry earth, hammering thunder.
[1] The Rain Comes Again? Macedonian director Milčo Mančevski interviewed, Necati Sönmez, Central Europe Review Archive, Vol 3, No 15, 30 April 2001
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