Athens. An underage brother and sister, Voula and Alexandros, board a train to Germany, but are caught by the conductor for not having tickets. At a nearby train station, the kids are brought to their uncle who explains to the policeman that the kids were told by their mother that their father is in Germany, but in reality, she just wanted to conceal that they are the result of one-night stands by unknown men. The kids do not want to believe this and run away to go to Germany, anyway. They meet Orestis, a van driver for a dissolving theatre group of actors who have no audience. The kids are picked up by a truck driver, who later rapes Voula. The kids meet Orestis again who has to sell his motorcycle. Finally, reaching the river on the German border, a security guard shoots at the boat with kids in it. The kids are seen walking on a meadow towards a tree.
By restructuring the old tale of people searching for something only to in the end never find it, found from the legends of the search for the Holy Grail up to Dorothy's journey in "The Wizard of Oz", director Theo Angelopoulos crafted an art-film about the futility of a quest, observing how life is everywhere the same and one cannot (geographically) escape from its problems and miseries, yet still understanding its two protagonists, the two kids, for attempting to find something unobtainable (here the illusion of an idealistic father). Angelopoulos crafts the film with elegant camera drives, often in 3-minute long takes, which is especially aesthetically pleasant in the scene on the beach, in which the camera pans across several actors preparing for their history play, until this is interrupted when a car stops in the background and a man runs towards them to tell that the audience isn't coming, only for the camera to complete its 360 degree turn to go to the kids observing this.
However, neat as these camera drives are, there is no clear strategy where this storyline is going, since it lost itself with too many "off-topic" subplots which stray away from its main theme, ending thus in isolated, episodic images which do not connect in the end nor do they offer a broader spectrum of a viewing experience due to their sometimes "empty walk" and "empty talk". The image of a helicopter flying over the sea, carrying a giant marble hand attached with rope, is expressionistic, but it makes no sense and has no purpose in the story, and thus feels shoehorned. Of the two kids, Voula is arguably too young for this role: her actress, Tania Palaiologou, is 12 or 13 years old, but there are scenes (a truck driver rapes her in the truck, and she just emerges holding her skirt down and looking at blood on her fingers; Orestis wants to dance with her) that would have worked and made far more sense if she was at least a few years older, a teenager, and not a tween. Bizarrely, the rape is never brought up again, and thus it seems as if it came from another movie, like many other subplots, which just raise the suspicion that Angelopoulos had a good basic concept for a short film, but failed to properly develop it (the kids finally leave Greece only in the last 10 minutes of the film), and thus artificially prolonged it with rather overstretched, and misplaced subplots.
Grade:++
No comments:
Post a Comment