A Late Masterpiece
Just when you’ve convinced yourself, on the day before you’re set to leave Berlin, that the absence of that one masterpiece is OK, then off in the distance that white whale leaps over the waves…
The Greek director Theo Angelopoulos has played so insistently on Greek historical themes and employed such seemingly esoteric techniques at times, that he has ensured himself a place behind the ghetto walls of art cinema. But he’s always provided a rich reward for those who want to make the effort to understand his films (see a review of The Traveling Players).
TRILOGY: THE WEEPING MEADOW, which debuted at the festival today, is Angelopoulos’s indisputable masterpiece, a summation of his work so far that finds his themes and approaches working at high synchronicity. Like many of his films, WEEPING MEADOW is stunningly beautiful to watch. But this time the beauty extends right to the heart of a tale that after 170 minutes, ends with a soul-rending woman’s scream. This is powerful stuff and the kind of movie for which you make trips to foreign cities.
As Angelopoulos has done before, he covers the years between 1919 and 1946, when Greece was shaken by the return of decimated ethnic populations from abroad, fascist dictatorship at home, invasion by the Italians and the Nazis, and finally a bitter civil war between former Communist partisans and a government backed by the Allies.
His storytelling device is familiar, though it’s important to bear in mind from the start that nothing in the way Angelopoulos handles it will be. On a deserted beach near Thessalonica, black-garbed men and women trudge ashore, the last remnants of the Greeks of Odessa to get out of live ahead of the oncoming Red Army. Their natural leader is a man named Spyrous who, along with his wife Danaed, also brings along his sister-in-law Cassandra, and a son who, though unnamed throughout the film (he’s called “kid” even into adulthood), becomes its hero. Its heroine is there, too, a little orphan the family adopted named Eleni.
To some extent, Angelopoulos’s films are based on myths, and while it’s wise to keep that in mind, it’s not a good idea to get too carried away with it. Eleni’s name, of course, comes from the root word for “Greece” in Greek. Cassandra is the name of the dour prophetess who saw nothing but doom ahead. And it’s possible to see the House of Atreus, whose fall was the subject of so much Greek drama, in the shabby river town where Spyrous ends up a natural leader.
It’s better to realize that Angelopoulos conceives as Greek history a series of repetitions, but repetitions whose tragic grandeur doesn’t nullify the being of the people – the Greeks – existing within it. Moreover, Angelopoulos wrests the whole idea of repetitions away from Olympus and puts in here, as he does in so many other films, in the hands of popular musicians. The kid grows up into an accordion player who is taken under the wing of a dedicated band leader named Nikos. The band’s presence at every significant event serves as a blessing that ties what would have been isolated and fleeting moments of happiness into more transcendent moments that unify past and present, and Greeks everywhere.
But Angelopoulos has a similarly complex notion of time, which hear he presents in its sharpest form yet. The filmmaker has always been noted for his long, long tracking shots, moving images which his supporters have called stately. It implies a deliberate, or deliberately slow pace, as if the movement of the camera was somehow self-willed.
As the characters of WEEPING MEADOW struggle with their personal tragedies in a world defined by large-scale suffering, the camera does watch them with these movements. And, clearly, the shots are not dictated by the action of the characters, as the are in classic American technique. But neither are they merely the expression of Angelopoulos’s pictorialism or of grandeur.
The Kid and Eleni, their two children, Nikos and the band, are all trying to make their way through a bloody present and into a future that will be, somehow must be, better. Their progress is always hindered by an dark, obscurantist current in Greece’s past and a dictatorial nationalism that squats on its future. The speed of those tracking shots, which translate space into time by carrying an action all the way through a delineated space, measure the dynamic of a temporal flow that’s pulled by the past and resisted by the future.
WEEPING MEADOW is the masterpiece it is because Angelopoulos has made a more complex, not simpler, film than before. His reservations about Greek cultural traditions, for example, find expression in a riveting sequence that begins after the refugees’ town is flooded. The school teacher sets up his classroom on a boot and begins reading poetry. All his students, their mothers in black dresses and scarves, run from him, a wave of blackness scuttling across a brown dune. Angelopoulos then shows us the women holding icons and dancing in a circle, to a pagan beat, around a nighttime fire. It’s like a rawer, scarier version of something by Euripides, but a Euripides in tears.
A fuller treatment of TRILOGY: THE WEEPING MEADOW can wait for another day. For now, know that it’s out there.
Many films would have paled next to WEEPING. The next two films would have paled next to almost anything.
While regarding Brazilian films, it’s important to remember that Brazil doesn’t actually export movies. It exports kitsch, often wrapped in celluloid. This week’s item is O OUTRO LADO DA RUA (The Other Side of the Street), about a 65ish woman from Copacabana who tries to redeem her boredom by phoning in hot tips to the police. One day, she’s sure she sees a man administer a lethal dose of medicine to his wife and calls it in. When he doesn’t get arrested, she decides to handle to investigation of what turns out to be a retire judge herself. So they meet, they go out…
Fernanda Montenegro, the mysteriously acclaimed actress who starred in Central Station, stars here and she acts the way a woman like her character might drive: In a big car, down the middle of the street, horn blaring and everyone else driven off the road. The director is Marcos Bernstein.
In getting ready to write about the Chinese video feature GOOD MORNING, BEIJING (Zao en Beijing), I read the press notes and was quite surprised by what I found there: Explanations for things that never appeared on screen.
Yes, it’s a but of a two-plot mess. The major section isn’t bad. A 26-year-old girlfriend is kidnapped for a modest ransom and so he hires an off-duty cop and a few of his men to track down the kidnappers (the notes say the cop is a private detective, but the subtitles told a different story).
The other plot, which had no apparent connection to the first and never did develop one (according to me and everyone else in the theater, though not according to the notes), involved a couple of prostitutes with elderly male clients whom director Pan Jianlin insisted on showing in the full glory of their naked decrepitude.
The nighttime video of the cop, his men, and their client driving around Beijing from phone booth to phone booth had a nice desultory air, and it seemed like Pan was going to get somewhere. In any event, he didn’t.