Most teenagers assume that their life is inherently unfair: those chores are too much given the meagre allowance, their parents always take their siblings' sides in arguments, and so on. In the case of Nik, an Albanian teen who's confined to the house after his father either sparks or gets swept up in a bloodfeud with a nearby family, he may actually have a case for life treating him unfairly. Not that filmmaker Joshua Marston (Maria Full of Grace) turns this astutely calibrated, quietly wrenching drama into any kind of moping lament for Nik's situation. Instead, Marston's wide-angle take on Nik's predicament gives his choppy frustrations that much more heft -- he might be angry like a child, but no more so than the supposed adults who surround him.
Marston, who co-wrote the film with Albanian screenwriter Anamion Murataj, begins on an ancient scene that seems carved out of the hills from centuries past: A horse-drawn cart trundles down a path towards a line of heavy rocks, which a man gets out of the cart to shift aside, after which it trundles on; an old house broods in the background. This almost painted-looking image -- the whole film is shot with rich browns and reds by Rob Hardy, who created some similarly dramatic compositions for Red Riding: 1974 -- is contrasted nearly right after with a racketing scene in a café where Nik (a very likable Tristan Halilaj) sits with his gruff father Mark (Refet Abazi) and some relatives. They bicker and snipe with the men at a nearby table who are sick of Mark driving his bread-delivery cart over their land.
Later, in a moment wisely left off-camera, there's a fight on the rival family's land, a man is left dead, and Mark goes into hiding. Since the other family is then out for blood and revenge, Nik and his younger brother are ordered to stay inside the house, while his sister Rudina (Sini Laçej) has to take over the delivery route; for both of them, school can apparently wait.
Nik chafes at the bounds set on him almost instantly, and it's no wonder. One moment he's a popular, friendly kid with friends and something of a dream (opening up an internet café in a vacant storefront in their small village), not to mention a crush on a girl who is starting to seem interested, and the next he's literally bouncing off the walls. He takes to sneaking out at night and building a gym for himself on the house's unfinished second floor. Rudina, whose frustration is of a more thoughtful and bottled-up nature, takes her lumps in stride and even starts to show an entrepreneurial spark (leaving earlier in the morning to beat her bakery rivals, and expanding offerings to include off-brand cigarettes). Bit by bit, the film starts drifting towards the viewpoint of Rudina, who is both much more thoughtful than her hot-headed brother but yet less willing to question the status quo.
The mechanics by which the feud has to be mediated are groused over by a chattering band of elder relatives, who gather in the house to chew over various proscriptions of the "kanun" (a fifteenth-century legal code established by an Albanian prince to regulate matters in the country's mountainous north, including revenge killings). While they bicker over the best way to bring the situation to a close, or at least to get the family's male children a "besa" (a kind of limited truce), it becomes clear that these negotiations will move at the speed of dripping water: Nik could be stuck in the house for years.
Marston's film sketches out with vivid detail all the familial mechanics and psychological bruising that accompanies all this ritualized vengefulness. Stubbornness and unconsidered pride runs in the blood, while pensive men with coiled rage in their eyes and hands that appear eager to grasp for weapons fall back on codes and bylaws that seem more appropriate for medieval times. Threats might come via text message, but the result is still the same: everyone here is imprisoned, not just the boy trapped in the house.
aka Falja e gjakut
