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Landscape in the Mist / Topio stin omichli (1988) [Re-Up]

Posted By: Efgrapha

Date: 10 Jul 2016 17:44:12

Landscape in the Mist / Topio stin omichli (1988) [Re-Up]

Produced, directed and written in his traditionally episodic fashion by Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos, the internationally produced Landscape in the Mist concentrates on a pair of runaway children, played by Tania Palaiogou and Michalis Zeke. The kids are en route to Germany, where they believe their father is dwelling. The adventures during their trek range from heartwarming (the kids are briefly "adopted" by a group of itinerant actors and by affable cyclist Stratos Tzortzoglou) and harrowing (Palaiogou is raped by a callous truck driver). The film's title refers to the kids' perception of the "promised land" of Germany. Landscape in the Mist was the recipient of numerous festival awards, including the 1988 Venice Film Festival Silver Lion.

Synopsis by Hal Erickson, Allmovie.com

LEAD: It is a sad indication of the insularity of American cinema that Theo Angelopoulos, a Greek director with international stature, is virtually unknown in the United States. The 53-year-old Athens-born film maker, whose 1988 epic ''Landscape in the Mist'' opens today at the Public Theater, belongs to a stately modernist tradition that embraces figures as divergent as Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert Bresson and Wim

It is a sad indication of the insularity of American cinema that Theo Angelopoulos, a Greek director with international stature, is virtually unknown in the United States. The 53-year-old Athens-born film maker, whose 1988 epic ''Landscape in the Mist'' opens today at the Public Theater, belongs to a stately modernist tradition that embraces figures as divergent as Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert Bresson and Wim Wenders.

''Landscape in the Mist'' has already won many honors, and was the Greek entry for best foreign film in the Academy Awards last year. A slow-moving 126-minute work of exceptional beauty, ''Landscape in the Mist,'' which is the final part of a trilogy, elevates the story of two runaway children in contemporary Greece into an elegiac allegory of initiation into a forbidding modern world.

Like Mr. Antonioni's ''Avventura'' (1961), the work it most strongly recalls, ''Landscape in the Mist'' is the search for someone who is not there, which becomes a symbolic quest for value in a world that has grown spiritually hollow. In ''L'Avventura,'' the search is occasioned by the unaccountable disappearance of a woman during a yachting expedition.

In ''Landscape in the Mist,'' the quest is more anguished and hopeless. Having been brought up by their mother to believe that their father lives and works somewhere in Germany, 11-year-old Voula and her 5-year-old brother, Alexander, stow away on a train, hoping to find him. Early in the film, however, it is revealed that the father's existence was just their mother's convenient fabrication.

A situation that could easily be milked for pathos is treated by the director as a visionary pilgrimage across contemporary Greece during which the children begin to learn about work, money, love and violence. In the roles of Voula and Alexander, Tania Palaiologou and Michalis Zeke give grave tight-lipped performances that never grasp at sentimentality. Instead of weepy lost children, they are tough little travelers who clutch onto their dreams as if they were indestructible teddy bears.

Along the way, they meet many people, the two most significant encounters being with a brutish truck driver who rapes Voula in the back of his rig, and a friendly gay biker named Orestes for whom Voula feels the first stirrings of romantic attraction. Orestes, whom Stratos Tzortzoglou imbues with a winning sweetness, works for an itinerant theater company that has been traveling around Greece but can find no place to perform.

In an extraordinary scene, the actors in the company wander about a deserted beach reciting to the wind their personal memories of World War II and the Greek civil war.

Everyone in the film seems to be adrift, searching for something that has either been lost or that may not exist. As the camera slowly searches the landscape with a childlike sense of visual fixation, the film maker suggests that what is missing is a sense of continuity and tradition. The cherished vision of father is at once an indispensable myth and a partial lie. The players who tell their stories to the wind have no audience and no theater in which to gather an audience. Without history and remembrance, the director implies, people remain disconnected from themselves and from one another.

Occasionally, his symbolism verges on the heavy-handed. In one scene, the children examine a torn scrap of film in which they have been told that if they look hard enough they should be able to discern trees. Although the scene is beautifully shot, for the director to make such a blunt esthetic statement in a film this lyrical seems almost unnecessary. Mr. Angelopoulos's film shares with Antonioni's work a mastery of visual mood that equates the colors and shapes of the landscape with emotional and spiritual states. The overriding mood is one of loneliness and an almost romantic alienation. The terrain through which the children move, much of the time in silence - a land of rain-swept highways, deserted railway stations, and lonely seascapes - is at once desolate and beautiful.

There are sights in the film that once seen cannot be forgotten. In the most spectacular sequence, the principal characters watch transfixed as a helicopter slowly lifts a giant stone hand from the harbor in the Greek port city of Thessaloniki and slowly transports it into the distance above the rooftops. It is as if an ancient oracle were suddenly dredged up from the muck and given one last miraculous chance to point its finger in sad accusation at the modern age before being deposited into oblivion.

Review by Stephen Holden, New York Times

IMDB 8,0/10 from 3 086 users
Wiki

Director: Theodoros Angelopoulos

Writers: Theodoros Angelopoulos, Tonino Guerra

Cast: Michalis Zeke, Tania Palaiologou, Stratos Tzortzoglou and other