Follow the Money! Greek Films in the Competition
According to my esteemed co-juror Philippos Chatzikos, every Greek citizen is obliged by law to conduct at least a third of his or her financial transactions cashless. Such draconian measures are not taken without reason. Officially, this is a means against tax evasion. But there might be another, even more profound motivation behind this governmental decree. The native films shown in the competition of Athens’ oldest film festival introduce their audiences to a different sort of shadow economy.
They show in close-up how intimate and heartfelt the Greeks’ relationship to cash is. Banknotes turn up in singles or bundles, they change owners constantly, they are handed out secretively and received with a certain embarrassment. They are counted over and over again. Wallets play a secondary role here; money seems always at hand, albeit in frugal quantities. When coins are exchanged, this is a sure sign that the people using them are in even direr straits. Indeed, the contemporary Greek films bestow cash with a physical urgency that has been severely lacking in world cinema. Surely this could be taken as an indication of a deep distrust of credit cards and digital forms of payment: From a European perspective, this country throws down the Mediterranean gauntlet in the face of cashless Scandinavia. Its citizens defy abstraction, they are defendants of the concrete. It is a question of philosophy and mentality. On the other hand, why should a blocked credit card be more humiliating than borrowing money from everybody within reach? Each character in these films may have individual reasons, but it all boils down to this: No one wants to leave digital traces of poverty. After watching five Greek entries in the competition, it is evident that the economic crisis is far from over; the country still finds itself in the grip of austerity. What we discover on the screen is not a parallel society but a clandestine majority.
In Filippos Tsitos’ delightfully picaresque Receptions (Dexioseis), a retired journalist faces the threat of losing his apartment. He hasn’t paid the rent in months. Neither his brother nor his ex-wife can help him much. One day he falls in with a group of freeloaders who hungrily raid buffets at conferences, meetings and other official functions. His press pass may long be extinct, but his chutzpah opens doors nonetheless. He used to be an upright investigative journalist and still tries to uphold his pride. Now his life is reduced to mere survival and maintaining dignity. In the lively discussion after the film, the audience was split into two factions—one denouncing its presumed exaggerations, the other finding it true to everyday reality.
The policeman in Marinos Kartikkis’ neo-noir Diversion (Ektropi) has already lost his sense of integrity and shame long ago. His job is picking up corpses and transporting them to forensics. There he steals their jewelry without remorse. His son needs new shoes for soccer training and his ex-wife is sick of waiting for his alimony payments—he just can’t seem to make ends meet. Even the dealer for stolen goods won’t pay him anymore, the market for second-hand gems is all but dead. Kartikkis’ film feels like penny-pinching Dostoevsky; one can see the policeman’s downfall a long time coming.
Little Man-Eater (Mikros Anthropofagos), directed by Yannis Fagras in a terribly lackluster and jittery way, is the only case of increasing fortunes. Two vile day laborers join forces with an erstwhile idealistic female sea captain on a treasure hunt. A boat full of refugees has shipwrecked off the coast of a small island, and our trio aim to retrieve their belongings. Thus, they stumble upon a shipload of money. Bills are recovered, dried, counted again and again, as obscenely graphic as in a Mafia thriller. They fight tooth and nail over their share of the booty. The shadow of Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre looms large over Fagras’ lumpendrama—until the end when useless bills float on the indifferent waves of the Mediterranean.
It is peculiar that these tales of austerity are filmed in CinemaScope, the format of plenty and abundance. Not all of the five entries are obsessed with cash, of course. In Smaragda: I Got Thick Skin and I Can’t Jump, money only once plays a significant role—in a playful dispute who will pay the bill after the first date. Although director Emilios Avraam is concerned with the professional future of his heroine, his main focus is on her search for happiness and a new self-understanding on the brink of menopause. Her tragicomical encounters with men reminded me of Sebástian Lelio’s Gloria (a French remake, on the other hand, would most certainly star Virginie Efira). But Niovi Charalambous brings her own, quite irresistible energy to the role, a robust iridescence between romantic hopefulness and despondency.
The protagonists of Nikos Kornilios’s Winter Sea (I thalassa to heimona) seem to be completely exempt from financial worries. In his softly storm-tossed melodrama, three different kinds of solitude encounter each other. A young geologist finds herself between two estranged lovers who meet again after many decades. If you imagine a screenplay for an Antonioni film being directed by Theo Angelopoulos, you would not be completely wrong. The cast is beguiling, and the camerawork is of extraordinary atmospheric precision. This masterly meditation on time lost and (maybe) regained also boasts the most memorable line heard in this year’ s competition. “History is not for me,” the geologist declares. “Too small-scale.”
Gerhard Midding
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