Dust
''Dust'' begins with a darkened room that Edge has just broken into. He's prowling the apparently empty place for valuables, casting around and finding nothing but old photographs, some of which seem…
Dust
''Dust'' begins with a darkened room that Edge has just broken into. He's prowling the apparently empty place for valuables, casting around and finding nothing but old photographs, some of which seem to date to the beginning of the 20th century. He is surprised in his dirty work by the place's elderly inhabitant, Angela. He hits her, but before he can escape, she whips out a large antique -- but still functional -- six-shooter and proceeds to prattle on about her life. Her tale, unfolding in black-and-white, is the story of two brothers, the lusty outlaw Luke and the virtuous, religious Elijah. Their story starts in the Old West, with a fight over a prostitute, whom they both love and Elijah marries. The resulting envy and bitterness send Luke fleeing to Macedonia. After seeing a silent film about the region and its lawlessness -- an external turmoil obviously meant to mirror his own inner conflicts -- and a bandit known as Teacher with a huge price on his head, Luke also decides it's a place to make his fortune. Mr. Manchevski suavely shuffles his various narratives, sometimes smoothly presenting the juxtaposed tales and on other occasions cutting violently from one story to another. The literal violence -- gun battles and punches detonating all over both stories and leaving a spray of intentional confusion -- is staged with bracing clarity. When Luke arrives in Macedonia, the screen is deluged with hot, bright desert colors that are oddly soothing to him given the foreign locale. The director signals that he is as unreliable a narrator as Angela because communicating emotion is more important than relaying facts in ''Dust.'' He wants to convey the sense of being torn, which both Luke and Edge feel. Edge is hustling for money because a pair of thugs he owes are slowly -- and happily -- breaking parts of his skeleton piece by piece until they're repaid.
Dust
Drama,Romance,Western
Film Details
''Dust'' begins with a darkened room that Edge has just broken into. He's prowling the apparently empty place for valuables, casting around and finding nothing but old photographs, some of which seem to date to the beginning of the 20th century. He is surprised in his dirty work by the place's elderly inhabitant, Angela.
He hits her, but before he can escape, she whips out a large antique -- but still functional -- six-shooter and proceeds to prattle on about her life. Her tale, unfolding in black-and-white, is the story of two brothers, the lusty outlaw Luke and the virtuous, religious Elijah. Their story starts in the Old West, with a fight over a prostitute, whom they both love and Elijah marries.
The resulting envy and bitterness send Luke fleeing to Macedonia. After seeing a silent film about the region and its lawlessness -- an external turmoil obviously meant to mirror his own inner conflicts -- and a bandit known as Teacher with a huge price on his head, Luke also decides it's a place to make his fortune. Mr.
Manchevski suavely shuffles his various narratives, sometimes smoothly presenting the juxtaposed tales and on other occasions cutting violently from one story to another. The literal violence -- gun battles and punches detonating all over both stories and leaving a spray of intentional confusion -- is staged with bracing clarity. When Luke arrives in Macedonia, the screen is deluged with hot, bright desert colors that are oddly soothing to him given the foreign locale.
The director signals that he is as unreliable a narrator as Angela because communicating emotion is more important than relaying facts in ''Dust.'' He wants to convey the sense of being torn, which both Luke and Edge feel. Edge is hustling for money because a pair of thugs he owes are slowly -- and happily -- breaking parts of his skeleton piece by piece until they're repaid..