POLITIKI KOUZINA **
DIRECTED BY Tassos Boulmetis
STARRING Georges Corraface, Ieroklis Michaelides, Renia Louizidou
Greece 2003 108 mins.
In Greek.
TIMELINE *
DIRECTED BY Richard Donner
STARRING Paul Walker, Frances O’Connor, Gerard Butler, Billy Connolly
US 2003 116 mins.
25th HOUR ****1/2
DIRECTED BY Spike Lee
STARRING Edward Norton, Barry Pepper, Philip Seymour Hoffman
US 2002 135 mins.
“The past isn’t dead,” William Faulkner memorably wrote. “It’s not even past”.
Faulkner was writing in the Deep South, a place of simmering vendettas and strict social codes, haunted by the ghosts of old injustices and the open wound of the Civil War – a place, in short, very much like Cyprus, and the Greek world in general. Europeans and North Americans are often struck by how tenaciously we cling to the past (or the past clings to us) round these parts; they’re likely to be puzzled by Politiki Kouzina, a drama that’s technically proficient but emotionally banal if you’re not familiar with the Greek melancholia over Constantinople (and even if you are).
That’s not the way it’s supposed to go. The film is the biggest-ever Greek production (it even says so on the poster, as if bigness in itself were a reason to watch it), and widely touted as the long-overdue breakthrough for Greek cinema on the international arthouse scene; titled A Touch of Spice, the hope is that it’ll follow in the footsteps of other ‘food porn’ movies like Eat Drink Man Woman (Taiwan), Babette’s Feast (Denmark), Big Night (US) and Like Water for Chocolate (Mexico), maybe even nab an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. Everyone comments on how ‘Hollywood’ it looks, down to little touches like a credit for the casting director right after the actors in the opening titles.
In fact, much of the ‘Hollywood’ look is a question of computers and 3-D animation, which is what you get in shots like the (physically impossible) crane up from a close-up of an imam at a minaret, going all the way back to a panoramic vista of an obviously computer-generated Istanbul. Director Tassos Boulmetis is co-credited with the special effects, and obviously gave a lot of thought to these little touches; he also gives the film a nicely burnished look – “darker than usual,” as one audience member noted approvingly to her friend as we were filing out – pointing up its status as a tale of Loss. Alas, the script is a long way behind the style, stuck in the same fake ‘poetry’ and plodding, deadly pace that have bedevilled Greek cinema for years.
The film is full of maxims and motifs, ironic echoes and reversals. “There are two kinds of travellers,” intones Fanis, our hero: “Those who look at the map before setting out, and those who look in the mirror”. Food is a constant refrain, closely followed by astronomy (contained, so we’re told, in “gastronomy”). As a Greek boy in Istanbul, Fanis courts the little Turkish girl he has a crush on by telling her the secrets of ‘politiki kouzina’, the cuisine of Constantinople; in return, she agrees to dance for him (cue self-consciously beautiful shot of girl dancing, with golden light streaming through the windows); years later, when they meet again as grown-ups, she cooks for him – and he offers to dance for her. His wise old grandfather is a constant fount of rascally aphorisms: cinnamon, he muses, is “both bitter and sweet, like all women”; “Life,” he smiles, “like food, needs a pinch of salt”.
If you don’t see anything wrong with this stuff, you’re probably among the many thousands that have made the film such a massive hit in both Greece and Cyprus. Personally I can only take so much self-conscious sensitivity, especially when it’s played as straight drama rather than abstracted or stylized (say what you like about Angelopoulos, but he does create a sui generis world for his faux-poetic ramblings). Politiki Kouzina is flat, overloaded with portentous music, and – for all the computer effects – visually unmemorable; in short, it’s about as magical as a message on a greeting card.
Will the film work abroad? Somehow I doubt it. Yes, you’ve got the food (though the camera doesn’t really linger on the dishes, or properly fetishise them). Yes, you’ve got the wacky relatives in Big Fat Greek Wedding style (including a borderline-tasteless gag about an aunt with Parkinson’s). But the plot depends on something that gets lost in translation – the old animosity between Greeks and Turks, and the trauma of being evicted from Constantinople. The film isn’t anti-Turkish exactly, but it does recoil from any happy ending, which will no doubt puzzle outsiders; why (they may wonder) should a cute magical-realist jape suddenly turn melancholy for no apparent reason? Ironically, a film that’s being touted as a product of the ‘new’ Greece – the Greece of Simitis and the EU, the Greece of special effects and computer animation – finally has its feet too firmly in the mire of old grievances. The past isn’t dead; it’s not even past.
“The past is where it’s at,” affirms a character in the extravagantly awful Timeline, based on a novel by Michael Jurassic Park Crichton. This is the most reliable of sci-fi genres, the Time-travel movie, yet done so ineptly it doesn’t even qualify for so-bad-it’s-good status. To quote Paul Walker as our hero – possibly, on the strength of this performance and the two Fast and the Furious films, the worst actor currently working – “It sucks big time”.
Paul and his mates are archaeologists – but cool ones, like the weather scientists in Twister; before going down into a hole, they yell “Be safe!” and high-five enthusiastically. Paul’s dad is played (unaccountably) by Billy Connolly, who talks in his usual Scottish brogue even though his son sounds like a SoCal surfer dude – making it all too appropriate when he says, “No offence Dad, but I’m not like you”. That’s one of two unintentional laughs in the movie.
Billy vanishes, and it turns out he’s gone down a wormhole back in Time, to a small French town in 1357; “We don’t know why the hole leads to this particular time and place,” admit the boffins – but it makes things handy for our heroes, who’ve been studying that precise time and place in their archaeological capacity and can therefore predict what’s going to happen. Amazingly, the film is so impoverished it finds almost nothing for them to exploit (couldn’t one of the team have had some modern trinket in his pocket with which to amaze the mediaevals?), and so functional it shows almost nothing of the period except a big forest. “This is France 1357?” muses Paul; “It could be my parents’ house in Oregon”. That’s the other unintentional laugh in the movie.
Timeline is shockingly dense for a big-studio movie, more like those low-budget Xena rip-offs you find late at night on Sigma. Anna Friel turns up as a local lass, and speaks French with an English accent (presumably because no-one could be bothered to get her a voice coach); our heroes carbon-date a manuscript and declare it to be 600 years old, showing a computer screen as proof – and there’s a big message reading “600 years” with the date 1361 beside it (shouldn’t it be 642 years? or has the computer been listening in on the dialogue?). Worst of all, it tries for emotional weight, pausing the action for a few seconds so Frances O’Connor (a grotesque performance) can say lines like “I killed that man. I’ve got to live with that”. Did they really think that would be enough? The mind boggles.
One last thing is worth noting about Timeline – the fact that the French are the good guys here, and the English the baddies. A strange choice for an American film in this day and age, you
might think – but in fact the film is so bad it was on the shelf for a year or so, having been made before the whole Gulf War II hullabaloo. The past lives on, albeit inadvertently.
One might say the same about 25th Hour, only in a different way: this is also a piece of the past, having fallen prey to the vagaries of film distribution. Spike Lee’s NYC-set drama was the best film of 2002, and the first American film to deal (even indirectly) with the trauma of 9/11; unfortunately I saw it over a year ago, and must write about it without the benefit of second viewing – it plays for five days only at the Friends of the Cinema Society in Nicosia – so there’s not much I can say beyond ‘Check it out!’
Edward Norton is our hero, a middle-class drug dealer on the brink of a lengthy prison sentence; the film takes place on his last night of freedom – with a couple of judicious flashbacks – which he spends with his two best friends, going on the town and generally bidding farewell to the world. It also starts with shots of Ground Zero, tying in Norton’s journey with New York’s own trauma.
25th Hour is a film about people coming together, which is why Lee repeatedly goes for an overlapping-cut effect – showing the action twice from different angles, as if for emphasis – when characters hug. Our hero could almost be a symbol for 9/11 itself, hence the infamous ‘mirror scene’ (you’ll know it when you see it) featuring two of him – one spewing hatred, the other quietly trying to rebuild his life. Yet the larger meanings never overwhelm a superb mood piece, driven throughout by the contrast between a sombre symphonic score and pungent foul-mouthed dialogue full of terse, rueful wisecracks, not to mention some of the year’s best photography.
It’s a crying shame that Timeline gets to play the multiplex – and Politiki Kouzina becomes the year’s biggest hit – while 25th Hour languishes. There are flaws, but this grave, elegant movie – building to a haunting final sequence – finds a kind of yearning intensity, an eloquent lament for things we’ve lost and things we can never have. William Faulkner would have approved.
