/ 8 September 1995

Two worlds apart

CINEMA: Justin Pearce

THERE=D5S something strangely fortuitous about the South African release=20 of Before the Rain coinciding with Nato=D5s long-awaited decision to slap=

Serbia on its blood-spattered wrists. The film is, after all, an examinatio= n of=20 the relationship =D1 or, rather, the lack of relationship =D1 between Weste=

Europe and the Balkans at a time when the West was still refusing to make=

a commitment to sorting out the mess in its own Third World backyard. This disjuncture between Eastern and Western Europe is conveyed by=20 means of contrasting cinematic styles, as well as by playing on the=20 expectations of an audience whose frame of reference is most likely to be=

Western. For its first few minutes, Before the Rain tricks us into thinking=

the film could be set any time in the past millenium or so. Priests in=20 Byzantine gear tending crops on a stony hillside, their main concern the=20 coming of the rain =D1 such touches seem to put the film firmly into the=20 genre of the honest-rustic period piece.=20 Then the contemporary world starts creeping in: a funeral procession=20 carries banners that seem to date from the Crusades, yet among the banners=

protrudes an automatic rifle. A woman, swathed in black, wears sunglasses.=

From=20a distance, someone is snapping photographs of the scene. The start of the London episode is physically shocking. The pace is faster,=

the surfaces shinier, the concerns snap from issues of life and death to=20 whether or not to terminate a marriage. A glimpse through a London=20 church door reveals red-robed choirboys, who echo the monks of the=20 Macedonian sequences just sufficiently to underline the contrast between a=

society built on ritual and one where ritual has long been emptied of its=

But, for all the incongruity, the reality of the war just won=D5t go away. =

London characters find themselves nagged =D1 and eventually confronted =D1=

by the shockwaves from the other side of the continent. One character,=20 Alexander, works as a photographer (the other main British character,=20 Anne, is a photo editor), and the power inherent in creating and=20 disseminating images is a recurrent theme in the film. Alexander, a former Macedonian living in London, forms a link between=20 the two worlds of the film =D1 but the ways in which these worlds have been=

established undermines any expectations that they might be reconciled.