The Third Half (2012), Darko Mitrevski
IMDB.COM: Rating: 7.6 (6,000+ votes)
If you are not familiar with Macedonian cinema, well, I’m obliged to tell you there isn’t much you’ve been missing on. Apart from the 1994 Venice Film Festival winner and an Academy Award nominee for the Best Foreign Language Film, Before the Rain – that I recommend wholeheartedly – I don’t know if there’s any other movie from that country which retains its quality outside of its borders.
That relativity of genuine quality has its paws all over The Third Half, a story about a soccer team in the Nazi-occupied Mace- donia during the WWII. It is some sort of a combination of Victory’s display of human spirit under the repressive foreign re- gime and Montevideo: Taste of a Dream’s romantic depiction of an epoch with the simultaneous jugglery of love stories and tumultuous times. That being said, we’ve already come to one of the two major problems The Third Half nurtures – the ab- sence of originality. Director Darko Mitrevski seems satisfied with imitating life rather than putting his teeth in it, therefore risking anything that isn’t already seen or mediocre, banal. His safe play may touch all the right notes for that part of his countrymen who evaluate the quality of art upon the initial reactions of their primal emotions, but for the keen eye of a true moviegoer, his film works as an insult for its pampering tone that gushes in egoistic self-importance. That same self-infatu- ation prevents Mitrevski from developing the main plot of the story, thus losing both himself and the purpose of his film in a maze of subplots that eventually accumulate to nothing, or not much in the least. The movie knows little of its strengths and limitations, so while striving to reach the epic heights, it falls through the cracks made by pathetic sense of humanism. The sole bright spot, the character one could actually sympathize with is Spitz, team’s German-Jewish coach played by the great Richard Sammel. The rest is history.
EUPHORICFX GRADE:
