Acting performances:
Goodbye… : About the acting performances: if one wants them to be above the average, they should have adequate prepositions for that – and the basic prepositions should be looked up in the completion of the characters in the films dramaturgy itself. Considering the fact that the dramaturgy in this film barely exists, we should be more than satisfied; a little overdose of pathetic, we would say, and anyway, far away from the optimal acting performances.
Maklabas: About this problem in this film we may say that is quite satisfying, considering the fact that the “amateurs” in the film are playing relatively close characters as their own in the real life, and some of them (as Zaneta Vangeli, for instance), even show incredible talent, considering the conditions under which the film was made. In any case, as distant from the optimal acting performance as the professional actors in “Goodbye…”, but from the other side of the coordinate system. If those (professionals) act “too much”, these others (amateurs) act “too little”. But, all of them – far away from their optimum.
* * *
Finally, let’s reveal the conclusions in short: in the efforts a new film expression to be found, we’ve seen a lot in our cinematography. Anybody who tried, somehow – would step into the trap of the unhealthy extreme of the basic novelty which that experiment brings (remember “Gypsy Magic”?), or – goes down to the mediocrity (or “Across the lake”?).
What can be said without further delay, and with no empty philosophy to be extracted out of all said above, can be, in short, put this way: Don’t you think that the wanted new, that different and fresh in Macedonian film will be the combination of those few positive elements accented above?
Won’t the “new” Macedonian film posses the technical qualities of “Goodbye to XX century”, and the narrative structure of “Maklabas”?
Or, isn’t that “different”, that true Macedonian film that is wanted and quested by all of us, isn’t in the stories which lay, unfortunately unused in “Goodbye…”, and isn’t that film in the visually-not-formed but colossal by itself narration of “Maklabas”?
When we learn not to forget what is, and what is not important about the Macedonian film, and when we learn that when we notice something good somewhere – we mustn’t deceive ourselves that only with that single thing we can justify – a film. What we’ve got till now, is: only pieces of a film.
The true film is what we still look for.