A Greek-American director, A, arrives to Greece to find the three undeveloped film reels of the Manaki brothers, the pioneers of cinema of the Balkans at the start of the 20th century. He hires a taxi driver to go to Albania, but snow stops the journey. He then goes to Skopje where the film reels are alleged to be, but the film archive informs him they were sent to Bulgaria. He has an affair with a woman in the train. He boards a ship sailing across the Danube, and arrives in Belgrade. His friend informs him that the film reels were sent to Ivo in Sarajevo for development, but that he lost any contact with him during the Serb siege. A daringly travels all the way to war-torn Sarajevo and meets Ivo, finally finding the film reels. A falls in love with Ivo's daughter, but she, Ivo, and two kids are shot by Serb paramilitary during the fog and thrown into the Miljecka river. A mourns after their death. He plays the screening of the film reels, but it is just a blank screen.
Director Theo Angelopoulos is an acquired taste, and his hermetic art-film "Ulysses' Gaze" is an even more acquired taste within that, which is a reason why it was too obscure to satisfy even his hardcore fans—it is a meandering road movie without a clear storyline, instead relying more on the power of aesthetic images and the subconscious mood to communicate with the viewers and bring its point across. It's a difficult film to sit through because it is so slow, but, just like most of his films, it "sinks in" into your mind and stays there after a while. The vague plot of film director A (Harvey Keitel) searching for some undeveloped film reels across the Balkans is used more like a travelcard than a real, developed film idea, and Angelopoulos only has the one film technique, the long, demanding Antonioni-Tarkovsky-style shots filmed in one take (the entire movie has only around 60 cuts), whch becomes monotone after a while. However, he is able to use it in his vision of the allegorical history of the Balkans, starting from the Greece, a symbol of hope and civilization; through the ship transporting a 100-foot tall broken statue of Lenin, lying horizontally, along the Danube as the people wave at the ship from the shore, a symbol of the funeral of Communism; up to the siege of Sarajevo, a war at the end of the century in a place where World War I started at the beginning of the century.
Some scenes are indeed impressive, especially those surreal ones where past and present merge in the same location. An hour into the movie, there is a monumental 10-minute long scene filmed in one take—the camera drives around a house, as it shows family members greeting each other at the dinning table, all until the camera stops and holds still in a static shot in the hallway, showing A dancing with his mother, in a triple (!) New Years' party, where at first someone says "Happy new 1 9 4 5!", but then some agents enter through the door, take away a man who says: "Happy new 1 9 4 8!", while the people continue dancing, only for all their chairs, the piano and other possessions to be taken away by Communist agents, someone says it is "1 9 5 0", and then the family members gather and look directly into the camera, all the while it zooms in onto the face of a boy. In another example, A is interrogated by a Bulgarian official who reads him the charges that the Manaki brothers had weapons and explosives which were to be used against the Bulgarian army; A is then blindfolded and sent in front of a World War I firing squad, but then off screen someone is heard saying that his sentence is changed to exile to Plovdiv, and then A takes the blindfold off, he is back in the present, he goes to a Bulgarian border crossing and announces he is heading towards said city. With a 3-hour running time, "Ulysses' Gaze" is definitely overlong, ponderous and pretentious, whereas Angelopoulos spends too much time on unecessary or trivial details. The best part is the final act, showing the siege of Sarajevo, and A wondering through ruins of the buildings. There are some surreal moments here (patients from a mental asylum exiting the building during the chaos, observing two dead people on the streets and a car burning), and a chilling one (murder in the fog, where a Serb paramilitary says: "It's God who made us, and he messed it all up."). Did "Ulysses' Gaze" need to last for three hours? No. Is it a meditative essay on history of the Balkans that deserves to be seen? Yes.
Grade:++
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