Shadows

Milcho Manchevski

Macedonia, the Former Yugoslav Republic of

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Synopsis

Old-fashioned at heart, this film freely embraces the genres of social drama, horror, psychological thriller, folktale and love story to form a hypnotic cinematic journey.

REVIEW

"Lucky" Lazar Perkov, an appealing young doctor, "comes back from the dead" after a terrible automobile accident.  From then on, the characters that inhabit his world include dead people.  As real to him as are his living relatives and colleagues, these dead people ("ethnically cleansed" in 1914 during the partitioning of Macedonia after the defeat of the Ottomans) urge him, in spooky ways, to respect the dead and to return to them what is theirs.  Lazar's efforts to learn what it is he must return constitute the backbone of Manchevski's engaging, provocative and very beautiful film. 

From his brilliant "Before the Rain," set in Macedonia during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, through "Dust," an unforgettable U.S.-Macedonian Western, to this, his most recent Oscar-nominated film, "Shadows," Manchevski demonstrates a gift for narrative time-bending and corresponding visual texture that may leave you breathless.  At the very least, it will leave you thinking for days about what you've seen.

Other reviewers have provided myriad takes on "Shadows."  (Note especially Nancy Keefe Rhodes' review and interview with Manchevski for Stylus magazine on line.)  I add but two takes here.  First, the epigraph, from the Croatian singer, Johnny Stulic, "Around us, all these hungry people," signals the theme of hunger and food that persists throughout the film.  In one example, a cemetery scene on the Macedonian Day of the Dead, living people bring food and drink for their dead loved ones who need nourishment as they roam the earth for a time after their deaths.  Manchevski's talent for outright symbols is well known.  The food/hunger theme exemplifies his talent for symbolic plot elements that create a broad band of suspense.

My second comment concerns the element of Manchevski's work that in my opinion has been insufficiently noted:  his remarkable love for women.  It's a kind of goddess worship that offers a rare vision of wholeness. In the often rainy world of "Shadows," where Lazar says more than once how much he loves water, a womb-like fluidity surrounds the parade of women who are almost archaic in their power, sexuality, and wisdom.  From young beauties to old crones, these women command the story and its protagonist.  Here, the resourceful wealth and power of femininity, so difficult to find in our own culture's sexual commodification, shows up in a wide range of guises-as (among other things) irrationality, self-serving evil, sexual bliss, subservience, authority, a demand for historical and personal redemption, and, finally, an almost irresistible invitation.  Perhaps only Ingmar Bergman has given the world a comparable wealth of the feminine, a wealth we must reclaim not only to honor the past but also to rehabilitate the present.

-Beverly Allen