New Year’s Eve. Thomas is a shy, middle-aged bank clerk. In a bus, he spots a newspaper picture of the wanted gangster “Dragon” who resembles him remarkably. When the police start chasing Thomas thinking he is Dragon, Thomas hides in a night club run by underground criminal Spathis who accepts him as their boss. They reveal Thomas their plan to steal artifacts of a pillar to sell them to a rich American. Club dancer Babe falls in love with him. When the police arrests Thomas in the morning, and take him away, they realize he is not Dragon and let him go. Thomas spends some time with Babe. Upon realizing he is not Dragon, a gang member stabs Thomas with a knife in the night club. Thomas walks on the street wounded and dies.
Even though it was included in two polls by the Greek Film Critics Association as one of the 10 best Greek films of all time, Nikos Koundouros’ “The Ogre of Athens” is in reality at least two steps below such hype. This tragicomic tale of mistaken identity has some interesting existentialist-escapist observations on how people living ordinary lives dream of becoming significant and epic, but it is neither that well written nor that well directed, lingering too much on some ‘empty walks’ on the streets. The hapless, lonely protagonist Thomas carries the entire film: at first, after being mistaken for gangster Dragon, he denies it, then becomes ambiguous, until in the end he just plays along and feigns he is the gangster simply because he enjoys the attention of all the people around him, which give him the feeling that he matters. This is illustrated in two sequences, one in which he laments to Babe how one spends his entire life thinking you are fighting to achieve something, only to in the end realize it was all a waste of time, implying his pointless job; and the other when the club owner asks Thomas why he returned to the crime underground gang, instead of staying home, and Thomas replies: “Because it felt like a tomb there.” There are some traces of film noir imitation and playing with shadows and lights, yet in the end, “Ogre” is too confined by its routine-coventional style, lacking more imagination and ideas stemming from such a stimulating concept, though it gets a kick out of staying true to the legacy of Greek tragedies in the end.
Grade:++
No comments:
Post a Comment