Dust (2001)

Director: Milcho Manchevski

Writer: Milcho Manchevski

Composer: Kiril Dzajkovski

Starring: Joseph Fiennes, David Wenham, Adrian Lester, Anne Brochet, Nikolina Kujaca, Rosemary Murphy, Vlado Jovanovski, Salaetin Bilal, Vera Farmiga, Matt Ross, Meg Gibson

More info: IMDb

Tagline: Live by the gun, die by the gun.

Plot: Two parallel tales of redemption, a century apart. A burglar is held at gunpoint and forced to listen to a story. At the turn of the 20th Century, two brothers feud over a woman. She marries one; the other, Luke, a deadly gunslinger, becomes a soldier of fortune in Macedonia, and gets embroiled in a local revolution. He's after money. Wounded by his brother, he's nursed by a pregnant villager who urges him to "kill for good, not for gold." A dying old woman in modern Manhattan tells Luke's story; her listener is Edge, a young thief who's burgled her flat to pay off crooked cops who can send him to jail. He listens with the desperate hope that he'll find gold that he thinks she has. The stories intersect when Edge sorts out the old woman's surprising connection to Luke.

My rating: 5.5/10

Will I watch it again? No.

I was up for a Western so, based on the cover, I slapped this in.  It's a partial Western and not in the traditional sense.  It begins with a petty thief breaking into an old woman's place.  She holds him at gunpoint and starts to tell him a story about a couple of cowboy brothers from long ago.  It doesn't take long before the brothers find themselves in Macedonia.  Their story feels like a Western despite the locale so it's not all disappointing.  The picture goes back and forth with the old woman's situation that takes her to the hospital and the thief's desperation to find the hidden gold he thinks she's got to the tale of the brothers and their constant fucking up the other's shit.  It's more drama than anything else but not without some bloodshed along the way. The thief, Edge (Lester), seemed inconsistent when it came to his learning the whole story and the end of his little journey.  He came across as two different characters even though he went through quite an ordeal.  Fiennes really underplayed his role in a very quiet and brooding performance.  The ending was overly melodramatic.  Parts of it played out like a violent Western tale and other like fairytale perhaps not knowing exactly what it wanted to be but it was probably a bit of both.  It's OK.