DIRECTED BY Christos Georgiou
STARRING Akis Sakellariou, Myrto Alikaki, Andros Kritikos
Cyprus / UK / Greece 2001 87 mins.
CHICAGO ***
DIRECTED BY Rob Marshall
STARRING Renée Zellweger, Richard Gere, Catherine Zeta-Jones
US 2002 113 mins.
By Preston Wilder
YES, I know how it looks. I realise I’m about to give a (slightly) higher rating to a Cypriot film by a Cypriot director than a Hollywood hit that’s the front-runner for this year’s Oscars, with a near-lock on Best Picture (we’ll find out tonight) and near-record 13 nominations. I realise this could make me look like a pseud – like I’m only doing it to score points – but the evidence is clear. Under the Stars is simply better – not in a technical sense perhaps, but in the sense of staying with you longer and making you feel more alive as you leave the cinema; little wonder that it’s won six awards at various international festivals, including the Audience Award in Manchester.
There are flaws, of course: one turns (I thought) into an asset, the rest are just flaws. Technically the film is fine, and looks tremendous (it’s shot by Roman Osin, who’s since won a British Independent Film Award for his work in The Warrior), but still feels rather tentative. The very first shot has a rather clumsy focus-pull, bringing our hero into focus momentarily after he moves (instead of at the same time). Some of the dialogue is stilted, especially to a Greek-speaker’s ear: the eternal problem of Cypriot characters speaking ‘proper’ Greek hasn’t been solved, though some actors manage better than others (one in particular, playing the stockier of the two soldiers, is superbly natural). The opening half-hour is somewhat hesitant, not really carrying you along.
Things get going once the film turns into a road-movie, which is also where the story kicks in: Loucas, a refugee living in Nicosia, hitches a ride with Phoebe, who smuggles goods to and from the occupied North, paying her £600 to take him to the village he fled as a child 25 years before (most of the film is set in the North, though shot entirely in ‘our’ half of Cyprus). Loucas lives in the past, unable to get over the invasion – and his hatred of Turks – while Phoebe lives only for the present. Loucas is dour, laconic, prone to staring into space; Phoebe is sharp, boisterous, always looking for an angle. Needless to say, this mismatched pair bond along the way.
The story is serviceable, but what really makes Under the Stars work is the style and worldview, director Christos Georgiou’s playful view of people – literally so, since his characters always seem to be at play; football, ping-pong, leapfrog, pinball and more evolved games (like the games played between Greek and Turkish soldiers, or the Turkish couple who always pretend to be out when the previous owner of their house arrives to water his rose-bush) all feature in the narrative. We’re so used to sober, po-faced films on Cyprus – especially once the invasion comes into it – that the looseness and sensuality of this one come as a beguiling surprise: the film skitters along, with a feel for fun and the texture of things. The baking-hot light of summer; swimming in the sea at night (a wondrous shot, full of milky moonlight); dust flying as a jeep makes its way through a gently rolling landscape.
The latter shot gets repeated, which seems to be Georgiou’s way (other repeated effects include silhouette shots and ‘partial’ points-of-view, seeing through a window or peephole or looking down from a balcony); for all its looseness, Under the Stars has a very worked-out feel. The story too is precisely charted, at least on paper – a road-movie growing in intensity, taking off into dreamlike fantasy when they finally reach their destination. The problem, in practice, is perhaps that it peaks too early: the middle section is so rich that the leap into fantasy feels superfluous and a little stale (cf. Robert Benton’s Places in the Heart from the mid-80s, which used the same ‘twist’ but preceded it with gritty realism). The ending, Life and Death reconciled – with the stars as dead souls, and the sea as a kind of cosmic clearing-house – is a case of graceful execution battling soggy concept.
Yet the oddest, most rewarding thing about Under the Stars is perhaps the tension between the rest of the film and its main character. I have no idea if this was deliberate or not – I hope it was – but Loucas stands out (to use an old Cypriot saying) ‘like a fly in milk’, his sullen, obsessive demeanour in stark contrast to the mutable, sophisticated situations around him. When he almost sabotages Phoebe’s dealings with Turkish border guards, he seems crude and boorish (especially since the film shows a certain friendly complicity with the guards, and makes the whole thing look like a game). When he rages against the aforementioned Turkish couple – who are sympathetically shown – he seems unreasonable, and Phoebe quickly reminds him that “They lost their house too!”. Loucas is righteously angry – yet his anger is made to seem foolish.
Is this what I think it is, a new kind of Cypriot movie for a new kind of Cyprus? Under the Stars was part-financed by the government’s Cinema Advisory Committee, which perhaps is why any controversial aspects are being played down; the official reading of the film is apparently that ‘Peace won’t come to Cyprus till the Turkish troops have gone’ (an interpretation based on the death of a soldier at the very end). Yet it’s hard to ignore the suspicion that this is a very different kind of film altogether: the first to make fiery nationalism – the sine qua non of local ‘political’ art for the past three decades – seem outdated, and a little ridiculous.
Is Chicago also a new kind of musical? Its more rabid fans seem to think it is, coupling it with Moulin Rouge in the ranks of ‘films that make the musical cool again’. The unspoken assumption, of course, is that musicals were previously uncool, which will come as news to those of us who love The Band Wagon and Singin’ In The Rain – or, in a more modern vein, Cabaret and All That Jazz.
The latter two were directed by Bob Fosse, who also directed the original Broadway production of Chicago back in the 70s; the score for Cabaret is by John Kander and Fred Ebb, who also wrote the (inferior) score for this one; ‘All That Jazz’ is both the title of Fosse’s 1979 hit and the title of a song in Chicago. In other words, far from being a ‘new’ kind of musical, this follows squarely in an established tradition – one the Oscars have always liked to honour – except it adds the manic style of Moulin Rouge, cutting so frantically (especially in the musical numbers) that we barely have time to see the moves, beyond random flashes of arm and leg.
The question, of course, is whether that’s a good thing. Why, in a musical, wouldn’t we want to see the dancers strut their stuff without being constantly interrupted? The practical answer, in this case, is they have no stuff to strut: Chicago has been cast for star power rather than musical talent, and – though the leads acquit themselves reasonably – none of them gives the impression they could withstand the camera’s gaze for very long. Even Catherine Zeta-Jones, apparently the most experienced dancer in the bunch, looks lumpy and far from effortless as she tap-dances on a table in her big number, ‘I Can’t Do It Alone’.
The more complete answer, however, is that Chicago cuts into the songs so energetically because it isn’t about the songs, just as it isn’t made for people who love musicals. (Much has been made of how the film incorporates the numbers by pretending they
take place in our heroine’s imagination, as if song numbers were something that had to be ‘excused’ or justified in a
musical.) What the film is about is more the attitude that comes with songs, the old showbiz attitude that strikes a pose and says “You ain’t seen nothing yet” – glitz, exhibitionism, “the old razzle-dazzle” – just as the plot is about using celebrity glamour to (literally) get away with murder.
It’s no surprise that the original play was written back in the 20s; fast-talking cynicism has always been a mainstay of American comedy, and the play was even turned into a (non-musical) film called Roxie Hart in 1942. Much as I hate to play the film-buff card, I must admit I saw Roxie Hart on video recently and it really is immeasurably better than Chicago – mostly because it’s not so smothered in brassy self-assertion. There’s a hard-sell desperation here, aiming for the showbiz ideal where (to quote one of the songs) the audience loves the actors and the actors love the audience for loving them. Cynicism works better with a little irony – especially in the age of O.J. Simpson.
One mustn’t be too negative about Chicago: at least two of the numbers – the ‘Cell Block Tango’ where the various murderesses tell their stories, and ‘We Both Reached For The Gun’, with Gere as a ventriloquist and Zellweger as his dummy – are very enjoyable, and I guess it is a ‘good night out’ in a stagy sort of way. It’s just that it leaves you feeling hustled and worked over, and blinded by the red and blue filters and jostled by the bitchy, heartless tone. It’s a relief to go from this to Under the Stars, which at least gives the images (and the audience) a little room to breathe. Cyprus beats Hollywood? The evidence is clear.
The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.
