Director: Theo Angelopoulos
"Greece is more than a geographical locale to me. It's a spirit, a culture, and when I'm disgusted with present day Greece - the loss of spirituality and generosity - I go back to those words said many, many years ago." Theo Angelopolous from The Los Angleles Times 1/15/99
In the last few years the winning film at Cannes has gone to the film that could be considered more challenging and artistic as opposed to the film that was more entertaining and agreeable to audiences. Last year’s favorite Life is Beautiful lost the Palme D’or to Eternity and a Day directed by Greek director Theo Angelopoulos.
Eternity and a Day centers on an old Greek poet named Alexandre, played by Bruno Ganz, who feels he is in the last days of his life. He tells his family that he will “leave” tomorrow for the hospital. But since he is a poet he has a poetic type of reality and his idea of leaving is really a nostalgic soul searching journey through Greece.
If the film is considered more difficult than a standard “entertaining movie” it is because it is a meditation on memory. In this way the film is less predicated on a well-thought out plot than on the recollections of the past and themes of finding meaning in both art and life.
The art in this case is an unfinished poem -- left by a 19th century Greek poet -- that Alexandre has spent a good amount of time trying to finish. But now, at the end of his life, he isn’t sure he can finish it either. Alexandre wants to find the lines he needs to finish the poem that in turn could be the very lines he needs to give his life some satisfactory meaning.
Alexandre finds his inspiration in the form of a little boy (Achilleas Skevis). He roams around the city until he meets this young boy whom he saves from a black market ring that abducts and sells poor Albanian street children. One of the keys to the film from this point is Alexandre’s attempt and failure to take the boy back across the border to Albania. From this experience he learns that there is a similarity between the borders that separate countries and those that divide life and death.
All this is played out with Angelopoulos’ impressive cinematic style which employs long scenes in single take with meticulously, complicated tracking shots: Many of which last upwards of five minutes. This is the antithesis of Hollywood style bang, bang cinema and no doubt you could probably count the number of edits if you felt compelled to do so. Because of this it has some naysayers joking that the title has more to do with the film’s length than anything else.
The film also has a tendency to become ambiguous especially when scenes seamlessly segue into the past where Alexandre confronts his now dead wife Anna (Isabelle Renauld). Or it becomes a bit silly when characters move about slowly as if in a daze periodically spouting philosophy.
But despite that, it is a powerful film that deals with satisfactorily attaining meaning in life. And the way a child helps an old man find the way to the end of a poem, the end of his life and ultimately some kind of reasonable blending of the two.
- Matt Langdon
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