The Forgiveness of Blood

This quiet, understated film from Joshua Marston, an American, is spoken completely in Albanian, so no one can accuse Marston of going Hollywood after Maria, Full of Grace. It effectively deals with the medieval traditions doggedly sticking in the modern day--what can be more visually interesting than a horse-drawn bread wagon manned by a person with a mobile phone?

The opening shot, with a stone house in the rear and a field in the foreground, looks like a painting that should be hanging in the Met. Just out of the corner of our eye we see that wagon making its way across an access road. The men in the wagon, a father and his son, must move stones to allow the horse to pass.

We later learn that the owner of that land is none too pleased about his road being used as a shortcut. This trivial beef will lead to violence, and the viewer will learn that there are rules when it comes to blood feuds--they're even written down, in something called the Kanun. What this means is that the father of the bread wagon family (Refet Abazi) will go into hiding. His son, Nik (Tristan Halilaj) must show respect by not leaving the house, and his younger sister (Sindi Lacej) takes over the bread business, because it is unthinkable that a girl would be threatened in a feud.

Marston has a great cinematic theme here--the rules of a feud seem so antediluvian, but there we are, in a time where kids play video games and play with smartphones, when a family's elders will gather to decide what to do. Nik, a 17-year-old boy who misses his friends at school and deep-down realizes how stupid this all this, chafes at authority. He wants to bring in a professional mediator, but is shot down. He slips out at night to see his burgeoning romantic interest, and finally realizes that if his father were in jail, the family would be free to live their lives.

There's a lot of drama in this situation, but Marston plays it cool, maybe even too cool. There are some tense scenes when Abazi gets the idea that Halilaj may have sold him out. Lacej, a fine young actress, presents stoic courage as she goes about the family business, even adding cigarettes to the inventory. But I found the film so aloof that it didn't resonate as much as it could have. It was interesting, but lacked emotional depth.

My grade for The Forgiveness of Blood: B.