Joshua Marston's The Forgiveness of Blood (2011) is on the face of it a typically adroit, acerbic, visually eloquent, ethnographic Eastern European drama, of the kind regularly crafted by festival-beloved filmmakers in Romania, Russia, Poland, the Balkans and even Scotland. And in most ways that are important that's what it is - except that Marston, whose first film, Maria Full of Grace (2004) was set primarily in Colombia, is a California native and 40-something American. He has directed ample episodic TV here, but Marston has yet to make a film in the United States or in English. This shouldn't mean a thing to us, of course - filmmakers travel, stories are universal, languages are translated. But the thing about Marston's features is that both endeavor to thoroughly inhabit and express their local cultures just as a native artist would. They are in essence indistinguishable from indigenous product, and are in every way "foreign films." Maria interfaces with American culture, by way of its drug-smuggling narrative, in hesitant ways, but The Forgiveness of Blood is set deep in the rocky soil of Albania and never leaves. Why exactly an American filmmaker was compelled to tell this story, in this forgotten corner of Europe (Albania has no film industry to speak of, and no native filmmakers of repute), is a mystery, but the results are undeniably Albanian, and therefore the first glimpse any of us might have of what "Albanian cinema" might look and feel like.

Which doesn't mean that, were Albania to experience the contemporary filmmaking renaissance of Romania or even Slovenia, Marston would be its star auteur. Forgiveness is a polished piece of serious, rigorous neo-realism, but it's also rather too polished, and rather prosaic in its dramatic choices. Is it more mezzobrow and unsurprising than if it were made by an Albanian? Whatever - these are just circumstantial and possibly absurd doubts in the face of a fascinating and time-tempered scenario, set in a rural Euro wasteland where modernity struggles to get a foothold, and ancient traditions linger like genetic malformations. The opening shot, behind the credits, is the first tip of the dominoes: a horse-drawn cart crosses a field, diagonally across the screen, along a weedy path, until it meets a line of large rocks, placed as obstructions. Simply, the gruff father (Refet Abazi), accompanied by his high school-age son Nik (Tristan Halilaj), gets out and moves the stones, and all is well until later, in the local watering hole, Nik and his father are chided and vaguely threatened by men at another table - including the owner of the field, who put the rocks there to prevent just such trespassing. The next time the bead-selling cart passes that same spot, the owner and Dad exchange some tame words we understand to be boiling over with ancestral menace and spite, and in a single cut - to Nik, who gets picked up off the street by family friends in full-emergency mode - everything has happened. We learn as Nic does that his father returned with his uncle to the owner's land, there was a fight, and the owner died on his own knife.

No one knows exactly what happened, because Nic's father is in hiding, not from the law so much as from the dead man's family, who will in accordance to tradition kill any grown male member of the family in retribution. So Nic is suddenly sequestered, imprisoned in his own home, as the blood feud begins and quickly festers. The family faces destitution, the dead landowner's family tries to turn the community against them, and Nic's teen sister Rudina, played with tense serenity by Sindi Lacej, puts herself on the frontline by quitting school and hustling bread and cigarettes from her father's cart.

The performances are all powerful and faultless - even if only Abazi is close to being a professional actor, back in his native Macedonia. The movie focuses on Nic and his generational angst, stuck in a terminal trap that follows tribal rules first coded in the 15th century, and in this Marston treads upon very familiar, even cliched ground: the son vs. the father, the new vs. the old, family confrontations over kitchen tables and on front steps that climax with a shameful slap or single loaded word. Plus, a nascent teen romance mitigated by the older generation's viciously stupid norms. The blood feud particulars, especially once the village elders get involved in the mechanics of seeking a truce, is always fascinating, and there's no point in the film's trajectory, which includes a good deal of Nic spinning his wheels at home, that Marston missteps - his choices are sure and respectful, and make perfect narrative sense. But perhaps because we've seen so many recent films from Eastern Europe, it's hard not to wish Marston had made a few more risky choices, avoided a few more predictabilities, taken a few lessons - in story-making and in visual restraint - from the Romanians. Contrasted to the films of Radu Muntean, Cristi Puiu, and Christian Mungiu, which in the last few years have admittedly raised the bar on acerbic naturalism and bitter cultural portraiture all over the globe, Marston's movie is formally conventional and rather tame in its dramatic peaks.

But he's got a handle on something raw and bedevilling; I don't think I've ever seen an art film about Eastern European blood feuds before, and you can hardly slight Marston for not taking full advantage of his material. Still, one can't help but wonder - because we know Marston isn't Albanian? - how a true native of the region would've made the film, and our guess would be: a little less slick, a little less James Dean, a little more entwined with the culture's unique quirks and spontaneous social fabric. The Forgiveness of Blood feels, in the end, 70% Balkans and 30% Santa Monica - which may be for an American as good as an act of tourist-filmmaking gets.

The DVD edition from Criterion comes characteristically loaded with features, including cast interviews, commentary, a making-of documentary, audition footage, and more.

For more information about The Forgiveness of Blood, visit the The Criterion Collection.To order The Forgiveness of Blood, go to TCM Shopping.

by Michael Atkinson