It didn’t take long for me to realise that Greece is a country in flux. Before I’d even plonked down my bags in my hotel room, while I was still fiddling with the card-key, I overheard a man talking on his phone in the corridor. He spoke of deals and meetings, like any businessman – but then, just before he hung up (and just before I walked into my room), I heard him add, with a sort of resigned casualness: “Oh, and by the way – who’s Prime Minister?”.
That was on Monday. By the time I left on Friday, a new Prime Minister to replace beleaguered George Papandreou had more or less been agreed-on, but the country was essentially ungoverned – and perhaps ungovernable. Local friends huddled over cheese croquettes and greasy bougatses (Northern Greek cuisine is notoriously heavy), lamenting the endemic problems that went far beyond the latest austerity measures. Major corporations – even TV channels – owed hundreds of millions in back-taxes, and refused to pay. Deaths went unreported, so relatives could go on receiving pensions. The state was carrion, and Greeks have been vultures for at least a generation now.
Everywhere, the talk was of crisis. The driver who took me to the airport had previously worked for 14 years as a dealer on a casino floor. 18 months ago, he was making €2200 a month, plus bonuses – at least till the casino asked him to accept a pay-cut to the frankly ludicrous figure of €575, essentially forcing him out so they could hire cheaper people; he’s been out of work ever since, and is now (when not driving people to the airport) burnishing his CV in preparation for a move to Australia. Even if all went well, I was told – i.e. even if the country can be rescued by the EU’s bail-out plans – Greece would be struggling, and heavily monitored, till the year 2040. That’s another 29 Thessaloniki Film Festivals.
The Festival itself seemed a bit incongruous in this context, a fact not lost on head honcho Dimitri Eipides: “I’m sure,” he admitted in his speech at the opening ceremony, “that some people here, and many more outside this hall, must be wondering why we need festivals and celebrations at a time when the country is sinking”. A fair point – yet in fact the Fest is more necessary than ever, and not just for simple escapism: it’s a lifeline, a reminder of other realities beyond the troubled confines of austerity and crisis. When it feels like you’re trapped in a bubble, cut off from the outside world, films are like messages in bottles, reassuring missives of our common humanity.
Here were films from every corner of the globe, each country struggling with its own problems – including countries whose problems are, or were, similar to Greece’s. Iceland also steered close to bankruptcy (and remains fragile) though I didn’t manage to see Either Way, the Icelandic film in the ‘Open Horizons’ section (“In the remote north of Iceland in the 1980s, Finnbogi and Alfred spend the summer painting lines on the winding roads that stretch out to the horizon”). Argentina actually did go bankrupt, back in the early 00s – and I watched three films from that country, including the elegant character piece Back to Stay (winner of the Golden Leopard at Locarno) and The Student, previously shown in Toronto and New York.
The Student is exemplary, an un-ironic tale of student politics – and a film that couldn’t be made in the UK or even the US, where politics are viewed with suspicion and a touch of scorn. Our hero is Roque, tall and rather gormless; he’s at university, taking courses for the third time, basically apolitical (“They’re all the same,” he shrugs) – but he finds himself involved in student campaigns and committees, initially chasing a girl but increasingly discovering he has a talent for “managing people”. That’s the film’s greatest strength, its lucid depiction of intrigues, negotiations and betrayals (it recalls clear-eyed 70s films like The Candidate, back when Hollywood cared about this stuff) – though there’s also another, hidden conflict, one generation being secretly exploited by another. The young must beware of their elders, the old Peronists – tainted by Argentina’s chequered history – worming their way into the new democracy.
Then again, two of the best films I saw at Thessaloniki held the opposite message: that we elders should beware of the young, feral kids making an appearance in both Play and The Kid With a Bike. The latter (co-winner of the Grand Prize at Cannes) is the latest from the Dardenne Brothers, Belgian masters of perpetual, perfectly-modulated motion. The Dardennes’ style is urgent yet spare (for years they didn’t even use music, though this new one throws in a few bars of Beethoven to devastating effect) – and Cyril, the titular 12-year-old hero of Kid With a Bike, is as much a Dardennes protagonist as Rosetta in Rosetta, utterly single-minded in pursuing his needs. What makes him touching is how modest those needs are, really just someone to follow (love is too much to hope for); the older kids nickname him “Pitbull” and he is extremely dog-like – dogged, devoted, desperately searching for a master. The film’s control is total, its moral sense exquisite; only some wobbly plotting holds it back (it’s implausible that such a tiny boy should be chosen for a robbery that involves knocking a grown man unconscious with a baseball bat), but it’s still among the year’s best.
Cyril isn’t feral, exactly, though he looks a bit scary – eyes staring, jaws working – in full-on determined mode; the kids in Play, an unsettling Swedish movie, are another matter, a gang of teenagers who prey on other teens, baiting their victims with a yarn about a stolen mobile. The film’s most salient feature is its cool, Haneke-like style: the camera never moves (except to zoom), the cunning compositions pinning the characters in place – and they’re also pinned in place by their social backgrounds, because the gang are ghetto-poor while their victims are middle-class. It should also be noted that the gang are black (or Arab) while their victims are not – though that’s never explicitly noted except by the predators themselves, towards the end, part of the point being that Western society is basically in denial, refusing to acknowledge its fear of the new multiculturalism. The film is rich with talking-points but also unbearably tense, simmering with a constant threat of violence – yet even that is ambivalent, because we never know how far the gang will go. Do they want money, or just control? Are they evil, or just horsing around? Will they end up bonding with their captives and take them out for pizza? Buried in that ambivalence is our own complicity, and fear of the Other.
Neither Play nor The Kid With a Bike premiered at Thessaloniki, of course. That’s the dilemma with film festivals: should the conscientious critic catch up with films that made a splash at other, bigger film festivals, or delve into new discoveries from this particular festival? After all, the real story at Thessaloniki wasn’t the well-known big titles – it was the Greek films, mediocre as most of them tend to be, and the films in Competition vying for the Golden Alexander (€20,000 Euros, not a bad haul in these parlous times), which are mostly obscure though this year’s winner, the Russian drama Twilight Portrait, won some excellent notices at other festivals.
Alas, I only managed to catch one Competition title – the Colombian Porfirio, a stunningly intimate study of one (paraplegic) man and his environs, which straddles the line between documentary and fiction and won a special Bronze Alexander “for Originality and Innovation” – and skipped the Greek films altogether, salving my conscience with the knowledge that we had no Cypriot films in this year’s line-up. Oddly enough, kids seemed to dominate the Greek field as well, buzzed-about titles including The City of Children (“A film about children and t
he games of fate in Athens, a city in crisis”) and J.A.C.E., a two-and-a-half-hour saga of a much-abused orphan growing up via reform school to a “tainted world of corruption, prostitution and drugs”. I’m usually a sucker for feelbad tales of woe, but sometimes life’s too short.
Then again, sometimes delving into local – or in this case Balkan – produce unearthed a hidden gem (isn’t that always the way at festivals?). I speak of The Enemy, a Serbian thriller with no particular pedigree – a couple of festival showings at Helsinki and Pusan, a youngish director (Dejan Zecevic) whose previous films don’t seem to have travelled outside ex-Yugoslavia – but a neat, well-worked narrative that kept a late-night crowd spellbound (unsurprisingly, it won the Audience Award in the ‘Balkan Survey’ section). This is a genre movie, taking a well-worn plot device and transposing it to mid-90s Bosnia, just a few days after the end of the war. As in Devil, last year’s (very bad) Hollywood horror, a small group of people (in this case an Army platoon) are trapped in a sealed-off environment with a malign, mysterious stranger who has them at each other’s throats – but a solid script and deft handling ensure it never tips over into silliness, working as a metaphor for post-war Yugoslavia as well as a crowd-pleasing thriller. Will it ever get a chance to please crowds in Cyprus? Maybe, someday, on LTV – but the multiplex slot it deserves is clearly beyond it.
That’s why festivals exist, to pick up the slack in a market dominated by big-studio behemoths. In a sense, individual films come a distant second to the overall experience of Thessaloniki – a large, easily-navigated, easy-to-get-to festival, a cinematic pause-that-refreshes from our usual Hollywood diet. You won’t find Swedish horse-riding gymnasts (She Monkeys, winner of the top prize at Tribeca) in Cyprus cinemas. You won’t find a nutty French drama (Outside Satan) where a rural angel/killer exorcises Evil from a passing hiker by making love to her, or a young Sicilian sailor dancing on the deck of a fishing-boat (Terraferma), or a scientist spotting a monkey on the Moon as he looks through his telescope in the jaw-dropping Faust. You won’t find a gay British love story (Weekend), or an Argentinean road movie (Las Acacias), or a horse prancing through a ring of fire while two ghosts – actually just actors wearing sheets over their heads – talk in Russian, as they do in the Catalan curio Finisterrae.
There’s a whole world of movies out there – even in places that try to suppress their best filmmakers, like Iran, where Mohammad Rasoulof was sentenced to six years in prison (later reduced to one year) and a 20-year ban on making films for “colluding against the regime”. Released on parole while awaiting the verdict of his appeal, Mr. Rasoulof made Goodbye, a desperately poignant drama – poignant in its title, in its subject (a woman lawyer trying to flee Iran) and its obvious low budget, a reflection of the rushed, chaotic conditions under which it was made.
Our heroine is beset with problems, being not just a dissident but also a woman, and indeed a pregnant woman. The secret police search her home. She hears about friends who’ve been executed. Her lawyer’s licence is suspended. The landlord won’t return her deposit. She can’t even get a hotel room without her husband’s consent. Her escape plan hits a snag. Her pregnancy is problematic. There seems to be something wrong with the baby. “I want to be somewhere other than here!” she says wearily – and the sentiment must’ve touched a nerve with local audiences, because both screenings of the film were entirely sold-out (I finally caught up with it on video). Maybe it’s not so surprising. In a crisis-hit, rudderless Greece increasingly running out of everything – time, money, and even a functioning government – Goodbye offered the only possible consolation: Things could be worse.
