STRATOS at the Berlinale 64

 

 

Stratos has a sad face.

His life is full of desolation, dark, divided between a night job in a pattistry factory and a daytime position as a paid killer.

We are here in a Greece that’s anything but solar. This is the rocky and lurid Greece of certain films of Anghelopoulos.

We might be in Thessaloniki, or we might not...

In this non-determined geography moves Stratos, who has affection only for one little girl in his neighbourhood.

And then, a crime calls for another...Violence engenders violence...This is a NOIR happening under the bleakest skies of Greece, but it has also a lot to do with the policiers of Melville and  José Giovanni... And a lot to do also with Eschyle, Sophocles, Euripides. Innevitably, relentlessly.

The spectator is losing and losing and losing foot (the myth of the labyrinth?) in this sometimes openly disgracefull story ...And there are those killer silences of Stratos...one that does little, but is always on the move and always shoots at people, without ever missing his subjects ...

All the other characters talk and talk and talk, in a dark and dirty language, full of the world renowned  “mallàka” and the english barely covering their original sense such as fucking, shit, bastard, bitch, etc...in order to indicate whatever is unwanted, hatefull and horrendous.

The story develops for 2 hours and a half , by spyrals that become more and more suffocating, and in the same time descending more and more, so unbearably low as to the center of the Inferno...

All that in direct line with the “new greek wave”, the one started by  Lanthimos and by Tsangari, a tough, ferocius, cruel cinema, in a true hainekean fashion, a disturbing and sick and distorted cinema.

Economides succeeds perfectly with his To Mikro Psari to communicate a feeling of claustrophobia, of oppression, of a callous and punishing destiny. With many magnificent scenes, from cemeteries to weddings...Dry, precise as lasers, but also full of allusions, undertones, menaces...

The coolness of the main actor,  Vangelis Mourikis, shows Stratos feeling as there is no hope in anyone alive...and after discovering many more background misdeeds, he decides to sit and wait for the end, but not before achieving a last good deed...

Stratos lives in a very complex world. Complex and decadent. The characters of this film always seem one thing and they turn out to be just the opposite. Betrayal is just around the corner, and honnour and dignity are just ruins of a distant past. Ruins as we see in the periferial panoramas of the film.

In this mediterranean NOIR, the director refurbishes many models. Such as the tired and laconical figure of the hero..

...And then, just as his main character,  Stratos is a film that might well have noble intentions, that tries to find the right key for looking at the future, but which is condemned by his past, by his own nature...

In one word, old and tired.

 

Giulia Dobre