Senki

'Shadows' is a confection of images, evoked smells, fascinating faces, pitch-perfect acting, and unnerving events--with perhaps the best crash scene I have ever seen in film. My observation re: the accident might sound like hyperbole, but the psychology of the scene is sheer perfection. Its details are choice. I felt horrified, too, empathizing with all the people in the reaction shots, but at the same time exhilarated because it all looked so damn interesting! (The film has great cutaways!) I love it when a movie takes control of my moods and this has a driver's opening. There is also some great counterpoint with scenes and music. Really, very masterful. This film is better with a second viewing--like watching The Conformist--one always notices new and fascinating details in the frame, in the psyches of its characters.

Today evening I watched the Shadows, the third movie of Milcho Manchevski. I believe the title of the movie should be Ghosts rather than Shadows. Even tough I expect it to be a movie about everyday life it turned out to be a horror movie. I believe this is the best Machevski movie so far and it definitely deserves to be at least nominated for Oskar, in the foreign movie category.

In this movie Manchevski uses the same rationality cliché as in his previous movies. However, in Senki this rationality is more stressed which gives good contrasts in the movie. To illustrate this I shall use some scenes from the movie, since I believe that many of you are familiar with them. Manchevski involves the contrasts between the rational and free, the moral and immoral, the individual and the collective, love and hate. The moral and rational win in the end. In a somewhat subconscious way Manchevski stipulates that the possibility of the origin of all the unhappiness lies behind the disobeying of the moral standards and rules. This can be seen in the beginning of the movie, before the doctor's traffic accident, when the doctor drove after having a fight with his wife, who, on the other hand behaved badly towards her child. She was smoking in front of him and even let the child light her cigarette. In the movie we can see various examples of breaking the moral standards. The doctor aimed to respect the morality, even throwing the money amounting to few thousand Euros because they were given to him as a bribe. He did this to respect one of the Ten Commandments – do not covet anything that belongs to your neighbor. He didn't want to steal and he was ready to help people even in the case of the old lady, that he took to the hospital. In other cases other doctors would say – I would not bother with her, she is old anyway. Doctor Lazar didn't want to commit adultery as an individual whereas everybody around him did. And, finally when he fulfills the task for the mother – the duty given by the church, to bury the bones or else the ghosts would not have peace. Now, a question arises as to where does this sense of morality arise in today's times of high immorality, when the world is in a chaotic state due to sins. Does this glimpse of moral value erupt only at unique individuals who remain heroes in comparison to the other immoral people. Is the source of sin in the fantasies – as in the lesbian scene between the doctor's wife and Menka? It seems like Manchevski subconsciously suggests that this could indeed be the source of all evil.

In conclusion, I believe that Manchevski would like to send a message through this movie that we should act humane and according to the moral standards for this world to become a better place

I think that there are problems with the plot regarding the disconnected sex scenes, and the generally missed point in the movie. It could have been made better. I don't think it is a replica of the "Sixth Sense", I see no resemblance in the plot between these two movies. Also, as far as the Aegean Macedonians are concerned, I think the the movie does not mention the exodus of the 1913 and the use of the napalm bombs at that time. It just scarcely mentions the events following the partition of Macedonia. It mentions the exodus during the WW II, and especially during the Greek civil war following the WW II, when indeed there was an exodus of the Aegean Macedonians and the Greek forces and its allies did use napalm bombs to destroy forces of the Communist led coalition, but instead mostly civilians and villages were hit by those bombs. Those who survived were exiled into Eastern Europe and today's Republic of Macedonia (then part of federal Yugoslavia). So those are the facts briefly mentioned. So the movie does not say at all that this exodus happened in 1913, but after 1913 when part of Macedonia was seized by Greece. In any way, most viewers will not focus on that part of the story as those events are just scarcely treated, and implied. They are secondary to the main story. I think it is absolutely unfair and wrong to see that as propaganda.

I am very disappointed after watching Manchevski's film this evening. I came to the screening with his masterpiece "Before the Rain" in mind but some of the elements that struck me most about the film were endlessly recycled imageries of death/memory/temporal boundaries, exoticized depictions of landscape, identity and cultural otherness, tautological and often overstated motifs of death and desire, which literally drown the spectator into a sea of clichéd, old-fashioned psychological thriller formulas. Don't get me wrong, I like films which foreground their rich, highly-tuned semiotic texture and which interweave symbolic structures skilfully and compellingly. But here this twofold directorial temptation towards the symbolic and the literal doesn't quite pay off cinematically. The music is great, some of the montage is also powerful, the initial spatio-temporal build-up promising, but the film never quite takes off for me. The surreal, nightmarish, ghostly presences that populate the screen and Lazar's troubled mind amount, in my opinion, to some of the interesting cinematic effects of the film.

When a doctor, who is down on his luck, gets in a car accident...he wakes up from a coma four days later...with a newfound ability.

As it seems he can now see the dead...well, maybe not ALL the dead...rather, only the dead who feel that his family has stolen something from them.

At first, he doesn't realize these people are dead...so he's interacting with people who aren't there...at least as far as other people are concerned.

And at the end of each day, he witnesses them die...before they return to life the next day, as if nothing happened.

Which, as you can imagine...been weighing heavily on his sanity.

And, to make matters worse, this is all going on, on top of becoming estranged from his wife and child, and having to deal with his overbearing mother.

The only thing getting him through all this, is the relationship he has been forming with one of the ghosts.

As things plod on, he eventually does realize what he needs to do: dig up the skeletons from his family's past, so that he can bury them, and end the cyclical torment of these lost souls, that are still trapped in the material realm.

In the end, it's sort of a mash up of The Sixth Sense and Ghost...though, it lacks the tension and engaging romance of either tale.

The romance angle here, seems particularly forced.

In that it's more sad and pathetic, than it is engaging and moving.

When all is said and done...it's not a bad film...but it is really quite slow, and fails to fully engage you.

It never really got me to the point where I empathized and cared about the characters.

I just kind of sat through it and it was over.

But, as far as films from Macedonia are concerned...I'm sure this is up there among the best.

It was that country's submission to the 80th Academy Awards, mind you.

5.5 out of 10.