Tag: Greek

In the Strange Pursuit of Laura Durand

Posted on by victorfraga

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM THE TALLINN BLACK NIGHTS FILM FESTIVAL

Antonis (Makis Papadimitrou) and Christos (Michalis Sarantis) share a small flat in Athens, and they also work together as musicians. They are both infatuated with a soft porn star from the 1990s called Laura Durand. They watch her videos repeatedly, until one day a fragment magically appears in the middle of the footage. In it, Laura is desperately crying for help. The two friends immediately embark on an incredible adventure is search of the elusive female.

They follow a number of clues and tips, going from one surprising corner to the next. A very unusual tour of Greece. At first, they interact with a group of hippies. Christos engages with a beautiful woman called “Sunbeam”, the first one he has had sex with in years. Next they visit an old lady in a large house, and then a very peculiar hermit. But are those just red herrings or are they on the right track? Will they encounter and rescue their much beloved muse? Or is she no more a figment of the prolific imagination of two young men obsessed with music and porn?

A different cinematic device is used for each step of their journey, ranging from plush 1970s aesthetics to split screens, black and white, pixelated, fuzzy and grainy images. As in an an old television set. A nostalgic tribute to a bygone era, to experimental film and also to music videos. The sound score is pervasive. Jaunty tunes bolster the narrative throughout, and keep your adrenaline pumping . Think of James Bond meets Boogie Nights (PT Anderson, 1998) and you are halfway there.

Dimitris Bavellas’s second feature film is a feelgood comedy aimed at young adults, particularly males. It’s likely to please teenagers, too. It is, as the film title suggests, a strange movie. It blends so many filmic devices that it becomes a little jumbled up. Sometimes the tricks (such as the constant changes of texture) feel gratuitous. Plus there are some indecipherable intertitles, and I’m not sure of their purpose. There’s also an element of cancer and constant talks of a biopsy, but I could never work out how this ties up to the story, neither narratively nor allegorically. Perhaps a little too ambitious, but still worth a viewing.

In the Strange Pursuit of Laura Durand has just premiered in Competition at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

The Favourite

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The maverick Greek director of Dogtooth (2009) makes his third English language film and his first period costume drama. The Favourite is loosely based on early 18th century historical record. Queen Anne, the last of the Stuarts who was beset by health issues, had some 17 pregnancies including many miscarriages and no heir surviving beyond the age of 11.

Her smart and shrewd childhood companion and friend Lady Sarah Churchill did much of Anne’s thinking for her, pushing her to support the merchant class political party the Whigs rather than the landed gentry party the Tories. The Whigs demanded support for a war against the French, while the Tories were resistant to the heavily increased taxes which funded the war effort at their expense. The relationship of Lady Sarah to the Queen was undermined by the arrival of maidservant Abigail Hill, a ruthless member of the gentry whose family had fallen on hard times and who was determined to fight her way back up the social ladder at any cost.

If that outline is true to the facts, the screenplay fashioned upon their foundation by Lanthimos and screenwriter Tony McNamara seek to explore less the historic detail of what actually happened and more the power dynamics of the three women involved. Olivia Colman is magnificent as the shy and vulnerable Anne who nevertheless wields absolute power as monarch. Rachel Weisz makes a fearsome Lady Sarah, whether the powerful manipulator seen at the start or the hideously disfigured victim of a riding accident she becomes towards the end as events turn against her. Emma Stone as the social climber Abigail however seems to be playing the same empowered woman character she always plays.

There’s a strong if historically contentious sexual element, with Lady Sarah the Queen’s clandestine lover until Abigail, who initially ingratiates herself with both Anne and Sarah by using a herbal paste to relieve burning sensations in the bedridden Anne’s legs, replaces Sarah in Anne’s affections. Further intrigues involve the English two party Parliament in the story’s background. Foppish opposition Tory leader Robert Harley (Nicholas Hoult, the memorable psychotic from George Miller’s 2015 Mad Max: Fury Road almost unrecognisable under a lengthy, light coloured wig) senses Abigail working her way into the Queen’s favour and wants to recruit her to spy on Lady Sarah and Anne. Although a fringe character, he is more pivotal to the action than his rival the government’s Whig PM Lord Godolphin (James Smith) who the Queen, under Sarah’s influence, supports.

Apart from Stone’s arrival where she’s literally pushed out of the carriage into the shit on the ground, her excursions into the forest to collect ingredients for a herbal paste to ease a painful condition on her arm and scenes of Lady Sarah outside shooting and riding, the proceedings play out within the confines of Anne’s vast palace – kitchens staffed with cooks and maids, lengthy corridors with footmen, the Queen’s vast bedchamber which is also a well-stocked library.

Cinematographer Robbie Ryan frequently shoots from bravura angles although his slavish use of Kubrickian reverse tracking shots is less than original and while the overall look and feel of the piece echoes Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975), it lacks that film’s rigorous discipline and doesn’t similarly immerse the viewer in its eighteenth century world.

Lanthimos still hasn’t bettered his earlier, homegrown Greek films like Kinetta (2005) and Dogtooth (2009) both of which not only present strange and unfamiliar worlds to the viewer but also completely immerse him/her in them. Those promised a maverick artist on a par with the likes of Lynch and Cronenberg, on which promise his bigger budget, English language movies (The Lobster, 2015, The Killing Of A Sacred Deer, 2017) haven’t to date delivered. As with those films, while there’s much to admire in The Favourite, it still fails to achieve those qualities of Lanthimos’ early films that marked him out as destined for greatness.

The Favourite is out in the UK from Saturday, December 29th. Watch the film trailer below: