Zorba the Greek (1964)

Anthony Quinn plays a shy Englishman that goes to Greece and ends up in a business enterprise with a jovial Greek playboy. While the Englishman is pallid and timid, the Greek is a dancing whirlwind who has his way with the ladies. ... Already from this description, I hope you realize what kind of movie Zorba the Greek is. Greece is depicted as a very, very exotic country with almost zombie-like villagers, and then this Zorba, who supposedly is to embody the good spirit of Greece. Michael Cacoyannis directed the film and I suspect he had non-Greek audiences in mind when he made the film. Basically, the film revolves around Zorba and his unruly Life Force that cannot be tamed. The business he and the Englishman has together seems to be a mere plot device in the movie that is there as an excuse to show off the old man's courtship charm and dancing moves. Exuberance, exuberance, exuberance. The only thought in my head while watching Zorba the Greek (it's a mystery that I was actually able to finish this movie) was this: can you imagine a female Zorba? This unstoppable, unabashed life force of a person? Have you ever watched such a movie? There is a representation of female - what should we call it? - lust for life in the movie. She's an old 'coquett', an owner of an unkempt inn. She recalls the old adventures and the men that used to court her during the war. Stories of sex and romance. In all these stories, she is the recipient of male attention, and it is this role that is upkept through the film, in which Zorba of course does not hesitate to try out his charms on her. But when Zorba moves on to other female territories, the inn-keeper is shattered: without a man, she is nothing. It's not the same with how Zorba is shown in the movie. He's Zorba, and nothing can take his life energy from him.

Ulysses' Gaze (1995)

When I was 16, Ulysses' Gaze (dir. Angelopoulos) was a great film. You know, profound. Re-watching it a bunch of years later proved to be excruciating (and very, very boring). Oh. My. God. This film tries so hard to be deep, to be pensive, to provide an overarching story about Europe, the fate of Europe, and the nature of man, grief and love and loss and memory and ... well, post-communist regimes looking for a path. Angelopoulos' film is spelled EPIC and that's part of the problem.  Harvey Keitel tries his best, and Erland Jospehsson is sympathetic, it's just that the film's grandiose aspiration is bound to fail. And it fails. This is not to say that all scenes fall flat - the image of the gigantic Lenin statue drifting on a barge is beautiful. Most of the time the dialogue is heavy-handed, the sweeping and slow cinematography seems derivative and the perspective of the entire film appears to be quite self-righteous - a film about the magnificence of cinema, the mystery and enigma of the moving image; but I never feel that I grasp anything essential about cinema - what happens is that I get annoyed by the pretentiousness and self-indulgence of the film (which has not to do with its being slow or inaccessible). The story has several levels. On the concrete level, it's about a guy who travels from country to country looking for a few reels of early cinema. But the story is also about the fate of the Balkans, Greece, nationalism, war, the past. // It is easy to think of directors who have the skills and power of attention to create a stunning scene out of a seemingly haphazard or commonplace situation. Angelopoulos works in the opposite direction. His scenes are composed to the extent that they appear stifled. There is no life left in them, they are weighed down by the desperate quest for MEANING. Roger Ebert awarded the film with one star. "A director must be very sure of his greatness to inflict an experience like this on the audience...." // This is the kind of film where EVERY SINGLE female person is attracted to this elusive main character A (as in Angelopoulos) - after two minutes in the company of this man who moves around like a zombie and talks in quasi-poetic mumblings, all of these women's hearts start throbbing for this guy; everywhere he goes, women's secret and innermost emotions are unleashed. zZzZ.

Dogtooth (2009)

Having read a number of reviews of Dogtooth (dir.: Giorgos Lanthimos), I was so curious that I bought the dvd version. It is a strange little film, a neighbor of gloomy pieces such as Haneke's The Seventh Continent or Lucile Hadzihalilovic' Innocence. Three children are imprisoned by their parents in a lavish house. They have never been outside, and the parents feed them strange ideas and fantasies. Even language is manipulated in the parents' home-brewed tutoring. Once in a while, a woman arrives in the house to service the eldest son sexually and at first she obligingly goes along with it. Of course, there is tension in this isolated and perverted universe. I am not sure whether Dogtooth is to be read as an allegory or as a more literal, Fritzl-like story. Of course, one of the many things that make this film uncomfortable to watch is the child-like prisoners - infantilized by their parents, captivated in an eternal, nightmarish childhood. In this film, even playfulness take on a hellish dimension, as the activity we see is as far as one can get from the free activity we tend to associate with play. On a more negative note, Dogtooth has the same kinds of problems that some Haneke movies are, in my view, riddled with. I have a hard time articulating what this is: maybe something to the effect of a suffocating perspective, from which all we can see is human misery, portrayed in a clinical way. Perhaps I even hava a difficult time figuring out how this movie was labeled 'black comedy' - or wait, there were in fact some scenes that made this intelligible (as the mother telling the children that she was about to give birth to twins - and a dog). In far too many scenes, I felt that the only point was to make me squint. Another way to make this point is that I, at least during a couple of scenes, seriously had to ask myself what the point of the film was, and that I could not really provide an answer for this. Is it a film about parenting and paranoic fear of 'the outside world' and all the harm it can do to a kid? Is it a political film? A film about brainwashing and reality? Or an extreme form of obedience/servility? Probably all of this at the same time. It will be hard to listen to stories about parents 'protecting' their children without thinking about this film. Don't get me wrong. I was gripped by Dogtooth; my questions concern in what way I was engaged by the miserable story. It is the kind of movie when it is hard to look and yet as hard to look away. Relevant here is also the aesthetic form of the film: superbly icy, sterile cinematography, focusing on the eerie white interiors of the home along with the domesticized greens and blues of the garden. Composition are often skewed, so that a leg or a head is missing. It is indeed an eerie film.