Dust (2001 film)
| Dust | |
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 DVD cover | |
| Directed by | Milcho Manchevski |
| Produced by |
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| Written by | Milcho Manchevski |
| Starring | |
| Music by | Kiril Džajkovski |
| Cinematography | Barry Ackroyd |
| Edited by | Nicolas Gaster |
| Distributed by | |
Release dates |
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Running time | 127 minutes |
| Country |
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| Language |
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Dust (Macedonian: Прашина; Prashina) is a 2001 time-twister film written and directed by Milcho Manchevski,[1] and starring Joseph Fiennes, David Wenham, Adrian Lester, Anne Brochet, Vera Farmiga, and Rosemary Murphy. The British-Italian-German-Spanish-Macedonian co-production opened the 2001 Venice Film Festival on August 29, 2001. It was released in a number of countries; it was released in the United States two years later.
Plot
A New York thief, a tough-as-nails hundred-year-old woman, two brothers from the Wild West, a revolutionary hell-bent on liberating Macedonia from the Ottoman Empire, and a beautiful pregnant woman all cross paths in a tale that spans two continents and three centuries. Its fractured narrative resembles a Cubist painting.
Dust opens in present-day New York City with a young criminal, Edge (Adrian Lester), being confronted at gunpoint by an ailing old woman, Angela (Rosemary Murphy), whose apartment he is attempting to burglarize. While he awaits an opportunity to escape, she launches into a tale about two outlaw brothers, Luke and Elijah, at the turn of the 20th century, who travel to Ottoman-controlled Macedonia. The two brothers have transient ill will between them, and they become estranged when confronted with a beautiful woman, Lilith (Anne Brochet).
In the New York storyline, Edge hunts for Angela's gold to pay back a debt, and gradually grows closer to her. In the Macedonian story, the brothers end up fighting for opposite sides of a revolution, with the religious Elijah (Joseph Fiennes) taking up sides with the Ottoman sultan and gunslinger Luke (David Wenham) joining "the Teacher" (Vlado Jovanovski), a Macedonian rebel.
Cast
- Joseph Fiennes as Elijah
- David Wenham as Luke
- Adrian Lester as Edge
- Anne Brochet as Lilith
- Rosemary Murphy as Angela
- Vera Farmiga as Amy
- Matt Ross as Stitch
Production
The film was written and directed by Milcho Manchevski, and produced by Chris Auty, Vesna Jovanoska and Domenico Procacci, Lars Bloch, Steve Clark-Hall, Richard Dooley, Frank Dragun, Vesna Jovanoska, Alex Nikolic, Gjorji Simenov, Branislav Brana Srdic, and Kevan Van Thompson . The music for the film was composed by Kiril Džajkovski. Principal photography took place in a number of countries and locations, including Cologne, Germany, New York City, United States, and Bitola, Macedonia.[2]
Release
Dust opened at the Venice Film Festival on August 29, 2001, and was later released in Italy on April 5, 2002.[3] Pathé distributed the film in the United Kingdom on May 3, 2002. In Spain, the film was released on July 12, 2002 by Alta Classics. It was given a limited release in the United States on August 22, 2003, where it was distributed by Lionsgate Films.
Reception
The film caused controversy when it premiered as the opening film of the 2001 Venice Film Festival. A number of critics accused Manchevski of having a political agenda and using the film to express it. The Evening Standard critic Alexander Walker clamed the film was portraying the Turkish army in a bad light and even called it racist. Several other critics saw the film as taking sides in the current armed conflict in Macedonia, in spite of the fact that the film was filmed before the hostilities began. Charges were nevertheless leveled that Manchevski’s film was anti-Moslem, anti-Albanian and anti-Turkish. He did not respond to the accusations in Venice, presumably hoping the film would speak for itself. He, however, did respond later, explaining that the film is even-handed in its portrayal of brutal killers – it does not spare the Macedonians, Albanians, Turks, Greeks – or the Americans, for that matter. Even though the reviews (and even some of the original reviewers) were much more favorable and nuanced once the film moved from Venice to the regular theaters, the damage was done, and Dust never achieved the wide distribution expected from the follow-up to the phenomenally successful Before the Rain.[4][5]
The film received mostly mixed to negative reviews from film critics. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a 21% rating, based on 14 critical reviews, with an average rating of 3.9/10.[6] David Stratton of Variety, gave the film a poor review, writing: "Essentially a Euro Western, spectacularly lensed in Macedonia [the] film borrows freely and unwisely from superior predecessors in the genre, while struggling to explore interesting themes involving the personal legacy we hand down to our descendants. [The film's] main problem in positioning itself commercially is that it straddles the genres: It's too arty to cut it as a violent action pic and too gore-spattered to appeal to the arthouse crowd."[7]
Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times wrote: "Dust is a bust, a big bad movie of the scope, ambition and bravura that could be made only by a talented filmmaker run amok."[8] Elvis Mitchell of The New York Times wrote: "Milcho Manchevski's stylized western, Dust, is a potent, assured and ambitious piece of filmmaking brought down by weighted dialogue and, playing Americans, the British actors Adrian Lester and Joseph Fiennes and the Australian David Wenham. This dazzling and dazed movie begins on the streets of contemporary New York, as a camera moseys down a street and then crawls up the side of a building, peering into several windows as various apartment dwellers play out their lives. It's as if Mr. Manchevski were thumbing through a selection of stories as we watch, deciding which appeal to him the most."[9]
The German historian Iris Kronauer writes in her essay Wiping Dust in Venice:
"Even before Dust is shown, the press start linking the fictional, historical content of the film to current politics. In June 2001 The Los Angeles Times suggests that Luke, the Oklahoma bounty hunter caught up in the Balkans chaos with no any idea as to what is happening symbolises NATO in the Balkans. The Times writer, David Holley had not seen the film, but does say: “Loosely based on history from the final years of the Ottomans, Dust can be seen as an artistic commentary on the wars that tore the Yugoslav federation as it broke up in the 1990s. [...] In some respects the film foreshadows the current fighting in Macedonia – which seceded peacefully from the Yugoslav federation – between ethnic Albanian guerrillas and government forces.
Upon it's world premiere in at the Venice Film Festival in 2001 Dust the political reception by the attending film critics continues. The British critic Alexander Walker set the table for a political discussion at the very beginning of the press conference, claiming that Manchevski had an political agenda while making the film In a question, he accuses the director of portraying the Turkish soldiers in Dust in a racist way (even though they are Ottoman; note the black soldier among them), trying to block Turkey's quest for joining the EU.
A number of Venice critics follow suit, focusing on the “issue” of the Turks and on the arbitrary association of the film with the armed conflict in Macedonia at the time of the premiere, thus conveniently politicizing Dust, without really dealing with the film itself.
They ignore the complex structure of the film and the New York City plotline. Tobias Kniebe of Süddeutsche Zeitung says: “Dust is based on a personal discovery: in photos the last cowboys of the American West look just like the wild bands of men who rose up in rebellion against centuries of Turkish rule in 1912. So Manchevski sends two young men from Oklahoma to the Balkan war of the time: Luke (David Wenham) is a bounty hunter in search of riches; Elijah (Joseph Fiennes) is a cuckolded husband in search of revenge. They become involved in the fight for freedom, the ethnic butchery that exacts a bloody tribute from Turks and Macedonians alike. On one occasion, it is a herd of sheep that is caught in the crossfire; on another, the village harvest. Huge watermelons burst next to soldiers’ heads – and afterwards, myriads of flies descend on what is left. All this is difficult to bear and it serves only one purpose, if any: to point out, yet again, to the parties in the current Macedonian conflict how necessary it is to search for peaceful solutions."
Jan Schulz-Ojala, writing in Berlin’s Tagesspiegel, insists on a direct relationship between the portrayal of the Ottoman soldiers and what he perceives to be Manchevski’s political views. The article also contains a scandalous personal defamation. With questionable logic that seems to be there only to serve his final denunciation, the critic abridges and falsifies the form and content of Dust, getting (on purpose or accidentally) many plot points outright wrong. Schulz-Ojala identifies three levels of the film: one relates to the encounter between Edge and Angela in New York. The second level relates to the Macedonian part of the story, as told by Angela. “The third shows several extensive, rural battle scenes, in which the Turks come on as stupid, loud, cackling villains (against noble Macedonians whose honour and sovereignty have been injured) so that after committing a number of provocatively gruesome crimes, they can be justly mown down by the surviving Macedonians. [...] Dust is loud in its concept, confused in its structure and wholly lacking in humour – in the shape of an Eastern-Western, it seems like a propaganda film for Manchevski’s thesis, disguised by a historicising veil: instead of the Albanian Muslims, it is the Ottomans here who behave like the epitome of savages, while the Macedonians are innocent as lambs and go to the slaughter in droves. And seen like this, the young black man, who the old lady explains the Balkans to, is nothing other than the West itself, which in the fight against eternal Ottoman Islam needs, to an extent, to be woken up with trumpet blasts. The caricature-killer aesthetic with which the Turks are stereotypically depicted – and that is the scandal – has something undeniably (neo)-Fascist. What on earth were the festival organisers thinking of when they chose this film to open the programme? Surely it cannot have been the sarcastic pleasure of making at least Berlusconi’s friends on the far-Right happy."
In The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw writes how Manchevski connects the modern New York story with the Macedonian story: “Putting a modern perspective on the abyss of central European warfare and bloodshed is a shrewd idea; the shootout sequences between noble peasants and fez-wearing Turks are unusual to the point of delirium, and Manchevski finds pleasingly cruel twists in juxtaposing the crime and corruption of modern Manhattan with the distant war of Macedonia. But there is something obtuse and disingenuous in finding this modernity not in the obvious fact of NATO intervention, but in a hip-hop New York crime scene, where no one knows that this history has real, contemporary meanings and repercussions quite distinct from Manchevski’s sentimental fantasy. He gives Macedonian identity an apolitical sheen of stylistic cool, just as Luke and Elijah get to do a sort of glamorous Butch – and Sundance – in Bolivia riff.
A similar argument was put forward by James Christopher in The Times of September 2, 2001: “Like Titanic, the whole thing takes on a misty rose-tinted view of the past. And by uncomfortable proxy, the present Balkan crisis [...] 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?”
In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Andreas Kilb tries to explain why “old” South-Eastern Europe is not suitable as a canvas upon which the Western genre would be projected: “It is true that Dust attempts to transfer American cinema formulas to old South-Eastern Europe. That this proves unsuccessful has nothing to do with Manchevski’s quality as a director, or with the abilities of his actors; rather, it has to do with the historical subject. The revolt of the Balkan peoples against the Turks was, after all, not a struggle for new land and personal freedom, but a war of blood ties, language, customs and religion. They too had wide-brimmed hats, rifles and horses, but beyond the mountains lay not the prairie, rather the village of the other ethnic group – and the cowboys were goatherds, who fought over the land of their forefathers.”
Upon the US premiere in 2003, Manchevski said in an interview that he did not take the Venice reviews at face value: “In Europe, politics substitutes for gossip. I guess Macedonia was the bad guy at the time. And I think there was hostility (to the film), which had nothing to do with politics. The way the film plays with structure is in your face."[10]
Accolades
| Year | Award | Category | Recipient(s) | Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2004 | Golden Reel Award | Best Sound Editing in a Foreign Feature Film | Peter Baldock, Jack Whittaker, Philip Alton, Tim Hands, Daniel Laurie, Richard Todman | Nominated |
References
- ↑ "Close Up With Milcho" (PDF).
- ↑ Holley, David (June 6, 2001). "Film Explores a Timeless 'Dust' Swirling in the Balkans". Los Angeles Times.
- ↑ Gibbons, Fiachra (April 13, 2001). "Guardian Features: 'Come on. It'll be fun'". The Guardian.
- ↑ Kronauer, Iris (2015). Wiping Dust in Venice (PDF) (Manchevski Monograph ed.). Skopje: Ars Lamia. pp. 273–287. ISBN 978-608-247-084-9.
- ↑ "Dust Film Review" (PDF).
- ↑ "Dust (2001)". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved June 12, 2016.
- ↑ Stratton, David (August 29, 2001). "Review: 'Dust'". Variety.
- ↑ Thomas, Kevin (August 21, 2003). "Dust Review". Los Angeles Times.
- ↑ Mitchell, Elvis (August 22, 2003). "Dust (2001) Film Review; Gunfight at the Old Macedonian Corral: A Western With a Flexible Compass". The New York Times.
- ↑ Kronauer, Iris (2015). Wiping Dust in Venice (PDF) (Manchevski Monograph ed.). Skopje: Ars Lamia. pp. 274ff. ISBN 978-608-247-084-9. Retrieved 6 October 2016.