5 out of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Exquisite
A Customer from Bournemouth, England,
19th July, 2006
LITM is unmistakeably the work of Greek master Tho Angelopoulos, from quiet opening through to the bleak, picturesque final image. His preoccupations (or obsessions?) with wedding ceremonies, young boys, travel, the sea, musicians [and/or entertainers] all feature in abundance, as do his stylish empty frames. It is probably not his best film either. Someone on the Classic Film board (IMDB messageboard) last week described Eternity and a Day as being a festival-esque film, perhaps pandering to the festival circuit with a style-over-substance technique after his [Theo's] anger at not winning the Palme D'or for Ulysee's Gaze. This is a very true criticism of a lot of Theo's films, and for good reasons. Greek cinema wasn't the fastest expanding on the planet, what with the Civil War and Junta censorship which was then hit by the advent of national television (in the early 1970s i believe) which almost instantly halved the box office returns in Greece. Greek directors like Angelopoulos and Michael Cacoyannis had to get funding from from sources (mainly continental Europe) and so to continue making films, success on the festival circuit was vital. When someone such as Angelopoulos, who was [he claims] kicked out of the IDHEC after a period of study there, and who engaged in Cahiers-style film criticism in the 1960s, is put in this situation a cinema of 'style over substance' is not entirely a surprise. Indeed, i personally feel it is Angelopoulos' temps mort, stylistic longeurs, spacial awareness and preference for aperture framing that makes his films so great. He will empty a frame, sucking the drama and emotion from a scene before presenting a patient audience a grand icon, image or motif befitting expectations. In LITM this image is a large stone hand lifted by helicopter from the water in front of Oreste, Voula and Alexandre - in this scene the lifting of the hand is all that happens yet i was utterly transfixed, not least because of it's context given the preceeding scene in which Voula starts to show she is in love with Oreste. Oreste's character, as all of them are, is an interesting one. The siblings, Voula and Alexandre meet him whilst trying to get to Germany to find a father who doesn't exist so his prime role appears to be that of a father figure for the children. Yet for Voula, subsequent to her rape(?) he is her first unrequited love. It is largely his precense that excellerates them on thier journey of self-awareness and maturity; does he therefore stand in for an absent God? God, as with Bergman's trilogy is noticeably absent from LITM. We see the industrialisation of rural Greece, we see the transport infrastructure and the exploits of migrants and Travelling Players, we even see a wedding and a dead horse but no evidence of God. When the children are kicked off the train, when their uncle rejects them and when Voula is taken into the back of the lorry where is God? The same of course, can be said of their mythological father. This emptiness in thier lives is evoked through long takes (average shot length of 82 seconds) and sparse 'recessive depth' frames couple with neat, layered planimetric framing in between. It is perhaps with some irony then, that the scene in which the children's lives are finally complete and they can feel whole [and happy] again is the final shot which is emptier than any that have gone before. It is also this morbid emptiness and the overt stylings that turn many people off the director's films. It is true also that the writing of the characters in LITM is for some parts weak - for instance we have to just accept the sibling's relationship and accept Oreste without ever knowing too many background details. There are also a number of scenes that seem slightly at odds to the rest of the film and many many scenes where knowing exactly what is happening is not so easy owing to the camera's distance from the subject. It is for these reasons that i wouldn't advise this to people who havent seen any other films from Angelopoulos; it is conversely true that this is less ostensibly political than some of his earlier films and that the score from Eleni Karaindrou is one of the most powerful in cinema but i feel the inaccessibility of large amounts of the film may be a difficult hurdle for many a viewer to overcome.
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