Today on the 5: I recently came across a Macedonian film titled Goodbye, 20th Century from 1998. I got some strong Apocalypse Tetralogy vibes off the poster and synopsis, so I decided to go ahead and watch it.
Ozone Nightmare
Goodbye, 20th Century Retro Review
Welcome to your daily five for Tuesday, July 16th, 2024. Over the weekend, I came across a movie titled the English title anyway. I cannot possibly attempt to pronounce the original one. I will destroy it and you wouldn't be able to look it up based on it. But don't worry. I'll of course have a link to it in the show notes. So you can just go and look at it yourself. But the English title is goodbye 20th century. And I saw the cover art for it, which depicts what looks like a homicidal Santa clause. And I read the synopsis of it and I immediately was interested because what it reminded me of on a surface level based on the artwork and the description was it reminded me of the apocalypse tetralogy that I reviewed a while ago, the four Polish films that I had bought as a set. And I thought this one sort of had that air about it. And I decided, okay, let me watch this and see what I think of it. And my instinct that it was going to be something similar to those Polish films was correct with a small caveat. So this is a movie from 1998 that is set up in a nonlinear fashion. It covers three different time periods with some recurring characters across 2019. What appears to be the early 1900s. I don't remember if they gave a year for that middle segment and then New Year's Eve of 1999. And we follow in the, there's one character who recurs through all three segments. And there's another character who's in two of the segments, but they all are related in terms of conveying some type of message. And I say some type of message because this is a film, when I talked about those Polish films, one of the things I said, and I said this about a number of different films over the years, is, okay, I know there's stuff about this movie that I'm not getting because I don't have the proper cultural or whatever context. And that is absolutely true of this film. And it might be the most true of this film of anything I've watched in quite a while. Now, I don't say that meaning it's bad or I didn't enjoy it or I didn't engage with it. I absolutely did, but I feel like, because this is a Macedonian film. And I've seen some reviews that referred to Macedonian history as being a big part of what this film is talking about. And because I don't have that knowledge of that history, there are probably things in this movie that I have either filled in myself incorrectly or have accidentally filled in correctly. But there's definitely a subtext to it that I know I'm missing. But even without that, I found it to be very visually inventive. I thought that it had an interesting, even though I don't think I got the whole story, the story that it presented got me thinking about it. I was thinking about it after it was over, which is always a good sign for me. And again, I think if you have more knowledge of this than I do, then you might actually be even more entertained and engaged with it than I was. But I certainly am glad I watched it. I would just caution anybody if you don't have that proper knowledge. There are probably going to be parts of this movie that it will be a bit indecipherable. But not in a way that I think harms the film just being realistic about the fact that I am sure there are things in here. I literally had to go and look because there's an element of religion to the film and there is something that is presented. I'll talk about it in detail on Friday because I don't want to give away too much in case people want to go into this without much knowledge and kind of pull out whatever they want. That's fine. But there was an element of religion in it that differed from one of the kind of tent poles of my knowledge of religion, which is not universal. Just on my general knowledge, there was a significant early part of religion, which I have always understood to be this thing. And this movie shifts that thing a little bit sideways. And I don't know if that's a byproduct of Macedonia and its religious history. Or if the movie just decided to kind of move the goalpost on this one particular thing to serve the story. I don't think either answer is better than the other. But it's one where I went, huh, I'm interested. Why did they do that? Why was that decision made? And I don't really have an answer for it in looking around. I never really got one. So again, I'll get into that on Friday. But overall, I was actually really interested when I got to the end of this movie and I was thinking about it. I think that is always to me, as I said, a sign that the movie was successful. As far as whether I understood everything about it and incorporated everything about it that somebody who has that knowledge of that history or is Macedonia themselves, that might be a different thing. But as a movie to present to somebody or to recommend, I think if you're willing to do a little bit of the lifting on your own and be okay with not having all the answers or necessarily understanding all the messaging, then I think that goodbye 20th century is an interesting movie. And like I said, if it sounds interesting, you should watch it and you'll probably have a good time with it later.