Landscape in the Mist
With “Landscape in the Mist” (“Topío stín omíchli”) we are
in the territory of symbolism movies. This means that what we see have only
limited apparent meaning, but is loaded with symbols that tell a much deeper
story. This is the type of movie that critiques tend to love and the general
audience ignores. If I can work out that real story, this can be interesting.
If I cannot, it is often an ordeal. I think this one falls in the second
category.
We follow two children, Voula (Tania Palaiologou) a girl of
10-12 years and her little brother, Alexandros (Michalis Zeke), who is around 5
years old. They are embarking on a voyage to Germany from Greece to find a
father they have never met. The movie is a sort of a road movie from Greece to
Germany. It makes little sense to describe this journey in a linear sense.
Instead, it is episodic where each sequence is only tenuously connected to the
previous and the next. The children are very quiet, especially to other people
and when they speak, it is in monologues as if speaking their innermost
feelings or dreams or maybe poetry. Scripted, is not a bad label. There are
things happening in each scene that often has nothing to do with the children
and even though they are there, they may not even be witness to what is
happening.
They meet an uncle that wants nothing to do with them. They
experience snow and a bride fleeing in the snow. A chicken is loose in a bar
and a violinist plays in a restaurant. They get picked up by a truck drive who
rapes Voula (Ick!!!) and they meet Orestes (Stratos Tzortzoglou) who works for
a theatre troupe. Orestes tries (maybe) to help them, but he comes and goes
throughout the movie. The theatre troupe is the same as in Theo Angelopoulos’s
earlier movie, “The Travelling Players”. Exactly what their function is here I
do not know. Orestes is a Greek mythological character that killed his father.
Maybe that is a hint.
The scenery is both real and unreal. It is a winter
landscape very far from the summer vacation Greece we are familiar with. Almost
all the scenes are dreary places. Dirty industry, lonely roads, construction
sites, poor housing areas. Even the train looks battered. It all looks like
places you do not want to be as if they symbolize a half-hellish place.
Germany, the coveted land where their maybe-father resides is, it seems, at the
border of Greece and you get there by crossing a fence and a river and as
Germany is decidedly NOT at the border of Greece, this means it symbolizes
something else and I get to think of the river Styx that parts our world from
Hades. If that is the case, maybe the girls are stuck in hell and a looking for
a way out to the real world. Maybe.
There are so many things I do not understand here, such as
the giant hand being fished out of the water or the presence of the theatre
group from the earlier movie and those are just highlights. So much is strange
and stylized that your experience totally depends on getting that deeper story
and I simply have no clue what is going on here.
It is impossible not to talk about the rape of Voula. The
fact that we do not actually see the act, does not make it easier to deal with.
Rape is terrible and rape on a child is simple one of the worst things. Seeing
it here was shocking. I know that since everything in this movie should be seen
for its symbolic value, this is not a “real” rape of a child, but a stand-in
for something like violation of innocence, but I do not really care. What I saw
was a rape on a child and that is a no go zone no matter what the intention is.
As mentioned in the header, this is a movie for movie
critiques. It has won a number of prices and with the right amount of attention
and a sufficiently intellectual approach, this is possibly great. My problem
with this movie is that I did not get there and so instead “Landscape in the
Mist” is an incoherent mess. My guess is that this was not a great success at
the box office.
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