Butler's Cinema Scene

“THE FORGIVENESS OF BLOOD” My rating: B (Opening March 30 at the Tivoli)

109 minutes | No MPAA rating

Though he has grown up in a dirt-poor rural community in Albania,  Nik (Tristan Halilaj) isn’t all that different from teenage boys anywhere else. He’s a modern adolescent, one who obsesses over his favor sports teams, dreams of opening an internet cafe, texts his friends and ponders the mystery of girls.

But while his eyes may be set on the future, Nik must contend with a present that is very much rooted in a barbaric past.

In “The Forgiveness of Blood” this youngster finds himself caught up in a Hatfields-and-McCoys feud that could very easily end his life before it really gets started.

Early in Joshua Marston’s film, Nik’s father and uncle get into a fight with a neighbor over access to a private road. The confrontation leaves the neighbor dead, the uncle in jail and the father in hiding.

Worse, a blood feud has been declared and as the oldest son of the killer, Nik is now fair game. Friends and relations advise him to lay low and never venture forth from the family’s glum cinderblock compound.

No school. No girls. The kid is basically under house arrest, and every now and then a vengeance-minded member of the dead man’s family sends a bullet whizzing through the front door or torches an outbuilding at night.

“The Forgiveness of Blood” is the second feature from Los Angeles-born Marston, and like his 2004 debut “Maria Full of Grace” it’s a hard-hitting drama in a foreign language that absolutely captures a sense of time and place.

The screenplay by Marston and Andamion Murtataj follows two plot lines. First there’s Nik, who’s slowly going stir crazy until he risks his neck by going out at night to meet a girl with whom he was spooning before this mess began.  Hopes of resolving the situation are fading — Nik’s father won’t come in voluntarily and not even the best feud negotiators (apparently negotiating blood feuds is a going concern in rural Albania) can get the victim’s family to budge.

The second thread follows Nik’s younger sister Rudina (Sindi Lacej), who is thrust into early adulthood. With her father out of the picture, Rudina must take over the family’s meager business of buying bread early every morning at a bakery and then delivering it to farms, homes and shops on a horse-drawn wagon.

With no man to vouch for her, Rudina finds herself facing a competitor whose automobile allows him to deliver bread to Rudina’s customers well before she can. But the tragedy that has crippled the rest of her family is a windfall of sorts for this adolescent girl. If someone else has cornered the market on bread, she’ll try a different approach … like peddling untaxed cigarettes. With no dominant male in her life, she’s quickly coming into her own.

“Forgiveness…” has been very well acted and despite its grim subject matter the film is often visually ravishing, thanks to Rob Hardy’s cinematography.

|  Robert W. Butler