Milcho Manchevski
Dust

Pretentious and very very confused is this "Dust" by Milcho Manchevski, previously a Golden Lion winner in Venice with "Before the Rain" from 1994, where a long series of events intertwined between London and Macedonia, his homeland. Seven years later, here he is again (we're in 2001) with a title completely out of place, only good for a few ideas.

The story begins in present-day New York, where a young man sneaks into a house to rob it, desperately looking for money to pay two corrupt policemen. Waiting for him is an old woman who, after stopping him, tells him a story set in the West, where two brothers, Luke and Elijah (played by David Wenham and Joseph Fiennes), were competing for the prostitute Lilith. This story unfolds so much that the thief becomes captivated by it and heads to the hospital where the old woman has been admitted due to a heart attack, to hear the continuation.

In this story that evolves between the fumes of New York and the dust of the West and the Balkans, one cannot understand where Manchevski intends to go. For two hours he overwhelms us with an organ with continuous flashbacks of incredible heaviness. It's a story that doesn't stand from the beginning, born by chance and advancing with extreme difficulty over the rugged rocks of the Balkan setting. Love motives and various memories intertwine with a fratricidal clash as violent as it is banal, with the old lady on the verge of the beyond continuing to smoke on her deathbed while her robber tries to find out as much as possible to uncover within her house, a magical treasure, somehow linked to the story the old lady tells.

Besides an incredibly tangled and improbable plot, the representation is also not appreciable: a myriad of events swap feebly through actors who, except for the good Wenham, are pathetic to say the least. The only note of merit is for the good sequences of the shootings/battles at the beginning and end of the film with respective guts and brains well spread over the bloody fields. At least a bit of raw realism within a narrative between the sci-fi and soft porn.

In short, if you really have two hours to waste, you might as well immerse yourself in this viewing, and I recommend it to those who thrive in complex and unpretentious stories. For everyone else, it's a useless, pretentious, and even slightly superficial title. The choice is yours...