A new blasty greek film at the 20th SFF (Sarajevo): "A Blast"

A Blast – Sarajevo Film Festival

 

This is how life goes.

Syllas Tzoumerkas « A Blast »,

with its burning actuality,

should occupy the first pages in all news papers.

It is a film that pushes down the knife

in the open wound of the Greek “question”.

Syllas Tzoumerkas

belongs to those directors

whose work has been highly affected

by the current greek situation.

Four years after

his debut feature film Homeland
(Hora Proelefsis / ΧώραΠροέλευσης, 2010),

Tzoumerkas delivers this sophomore work,

that had its regional premiere

during the 20^th Sarajevo Film Festival

and participated in the Official Competition.

It tells the story of a family crisis

where public and personal affairs melt

in an existential mal de vivre

that becomes a tragedy.

 

Maria (Angeliki Papoulia) lives in Athens;

she is mother of three
and married to Yiannis (Vassilis Doganis)

who works abroad as a captain.

Dissatisfied, anxious,

desperate by the bankruptcy
of an entire country,
prostrated by the distance with her husband,

she will explode out of anger.

Tzoumerkas is using Maria’s character

in a highly symbolical role.

 She could incarnate

all those dreadful fragments

of everybody’s life

in the contemporary Greek reality.

As it is a common feeling

that literally
there is no safe place
around us anymore...

Family, who has always been considered

as the crest of stability and serenity,

is now dangerous

and the core of all true problems.

Nowadays the enemy who could destroy us
isn’t some foreign or exterior threat,

but someone close.

The economic crisis has only been

the spark

that inflamed those fragile relationships.

 And since no one can really

be close to anybody,

they could easily be burned.

Assisting the emotional derailing
of the protagonist,

the narrative structure proceeds

in a syncopated manner,

with time inversions

between the past and the present.

They are meant to destabilize the public,

In analogy with the films

of his preceding colleagues (Lanthimos, Avranas),

even “A Blast" uses the body

as a terminal

for frustration.

Their acts become a rebellion
beyond any convention.

 

Hence a film that plays

with Eros and Thanatos

in an unstoppable
and uninhibited
pan sexuality.

The scene where Maria watches porn

in an internet cafe,

surrounded by mail users,
is the sign of that
powerful individual approach
of life. 

And, as the director explained
at his Q and A in Sarajevo,

it remains the only form of defense

in front of the horror of the present.

This is not a film about the crisis,
but a film in crisis.

Courageously driven
to the scattering point.

Where all nerves are tense,

temperatures are elevated,

pressure is at its maximum.

Where there is no other way

than escaping it all.

And Maria announces it, finally serene,

in a monologue that will remain

among the unforgettable scenes
of this rather modest 20^th Sarajevo SFF.

There is to say also

that Tzmoumerkas films in a divine manner.

His solutions open up his images

to an endless meaning

that is never exhausted by what we see.

But they stay and dwell for a long time

in our souls…

“A Blast" is definitely

a punch in the stomach

that could help at

waking up the minds…

 

By giulia dobre