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Zbogum na dvaesettiot vek!
DIRECTED BY: Darko Mitrevski, Aleksandar Popovski
FEATURING: Lazar Ristovski, Nikola Ristanovski, Vlado Jovanovski, Toni Mihajlovski, Petar Temelkovski, Sofija Kunovska
PLOT: In a fractured timeline, we encounter a man in a post-apocalyptic world in search of a hidden place where the fate of everyone is foretold on a wall, a turn-of-the-century brother and sister who marry for love over the objections of their family, and a man in a Santa Claus suit on the eve of the new millennium who stumbles into a strange funeral.
COMMENTS: You can instinctively know that a thing exists and yet be completely unaware of it until you’re face-to-face with it. Consider “toothpaste tube designer” or “menu photographer.” Their existence is completely logical, yet you’ve never had to consider their existence. So it goes with the surprising subject of today’s review: the cinema of Macedonia. Of course there would be a history, given its place in the Ottoman Empire at the dawn of film, decades as part of Yugoslavia, and running all the way through a naming spat with Greece. It makes perfect sense that there would be such a thing, but, I mean, who knew?
First-time directors Mitrevski and Popovski are clearly cinema aficionados. The first segment, a typical violent futuristic wasteland, immediately conjures up thoughts of Mad Max. The closer is a harsh Kubrickian urban nightmare with hints of Felliniesque style. There are more familiar references to be found, but the movie I think they were most eager to ape is Pulp Fiction. With its time-jumping thruline and a flashback vignette knotting the two halves together, Goodbye, 20th Century! feels like an attempt to do Tarantino with a Balkan post-war flair.
We open in the far-off world of 2019, which follows the journey of Kuzman, a post-apocalyptic pariah who seemingly cannot die. His encounters with a band of Road Warrior-style toughs features some intriguing imagery, most notably a pair of designated wailers who carry masks with them to multiply the mourning. Later, after an intended execution fails to do the trick, he has an intriguing encounter with a prophet who tells him that he must defeat a green-haired jokester/maniac (think of a certain archfoe of a particular dark knight) in order to reach a kind of memorial wall. That effort, combined with a sexual assignation with a tattooed lady who is revealed to be Kuzman’s sister, brings him the release from life that he seeks. It’s not exactly logical, but it makes for a tidy tale. In fact, the most surprising thing about it is that it ends, with half-a-movie still to go.
The other major story takes us back in time 20 years, specifically to the last night of the century, when a man dressed as Santa Claus endures the apathy of the public (and the insults of a young Kuzman in particular) before hoping to retire to his apartment for the evening. Instead of his bed, he walks into a surreal funeral taking place in a completely white room, attended by stern figures in black. A dark farce ensues, including a flatulent old woman, a purloined toupee, and a pair of hipsters who completely misread the room by bringing champagne and a boombox and spiking the koliva. Meanwhile, the very same prophet who advised Kuzman on how to die in 2019 is here to help prepare the body in 1999. It’s all very wacky and deliberately unfunny, and since we know from the earlier tale that the apocalypse is at hand and it’s just a matter of time before the funeral itself descends into homicidal mayhem. (Appropriately, the madness is scored by Sid Vicious’ version of “My Way.”) Naturally, this culminates with the creation of that very same memorial wall, meaning we’ve come full circle.
It all feels very metaphorical, and probably much more meaningful if you had lived through the miseries of Macedonia in the last decade of the millennium. I suspect the key to understanding Goodbye, 20th Century! lies within the interstitial vignette that connects the two halves. Presented as a historic look at the first wedding ever captured on film in Macedonia (the prophet appears here as the cinematographer, making him amusingly but pointlessly immortal), it’s actually the tragically brief tale of a brother and sister whose incestuous love ends promptly with the groom’s immediate murder. “If this is how the 20th century started,” the narrator flatly observes, “who can tell how it will end?” Violence is endemic, the movie says, even genetic, and considering how the former Yugoslav republics were mired in war in the years following the breakup, such a dismal outlook seems understandable. Everyone dies. Hope is a fool’s errand.
And yet.
Seven years after the dissolution of Yugoslavia and four years after the first Macedonian film to earn an Academy Award nomination, the country submitted this strange quasi-anthology as its attempt to repeat the achievement. It did not get the honor, but instead has eked out an afterlife thanks to its unusual structure and snarky attitude. (Consider that the film’s title is revealed after a trip through a toilet.) The movie has survived, the renamed North Macedonia has survived (with its very own cinematic tradition), and indeed all of us continue to muddle our way through a seemingly unending social nightmare. Maybe the apocalypse isn’t inevitable. It’s a nice thought to have as we embark upon a new year that feels like it could be more grim that the last. So raise a glass. Goodbye, 2024. Maybe the future won’t be the end of everything. Maybe instead of destroying the planet and marrying our sister, this time we’ll get it right.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
“Utterly bizarre, this first feature by Macedonian multimedia bad boys Aleksandar Popovski and Darko Mitrevski weds “Mad Max”–style grunge futurism, silly-mythic solemnity and anarchic humor to ends that make no sense whatsoever — proudly so, one suspects.” – Dennis Harvey, Variety (contemporaneous)
(This movie was nominated for review by Dreamer. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
