ETERNITY AND A DAY (52)

Directed by: Theodoros Angelopoulos

Starring: Bruno Ganz, Isabelle Renauld, Achilleas Skevis

The Pitch: A dying writer looks back over his life, his pain temporarily allayed by his friendship with a young orphan.

Theo Sez: Further proof that Angelopoulos is his own worst enemy, effortlessly capturing a mood of subtle melancholy then wrecking it (much as he did in ULYSSES' GAZE) by investing it with portentous Meaning, making explicit what should've remained mysterious. A lovely scene near the end of this contemplative movie finds our heroes sitting on a bus, watching Life ebb and flow around them : lovers' tiffs, busking musicians, a lone protester - and, unfortunately, Greece's national poet, the 19th-century writer Dionysios Solomos (writer of the national anthem and all-round "voice of the people") who declaims a poem on the subject, ruining the loose, dreamy magic of the moment. Looseness, clearly, isn't on the cards here - it's the most controlled of films, every snatch of song deliberately placed, every smile and sigh part of the script, every sentence crafted (in an elaborate, writerly Greek without a trace of spontaneity) ; it's also slow (the title actually translates as "An Eternity and a Day"!), unimpeachably feelbad ("Why must we rot, helpless, between pain and desire?"), so consistently grey it's able to do an invisible cut from one patch of overcast sky to another - and studded with moments of crystalline beauty, both in the 'money shots' (an unlikely but effective image of the fog-shrouded Albanian border, silhouettes clinging to the fence like moths on a screen-door) and, more simply, in the camera's glide through a roomful of people, or the opening crane-shot bathed in milky early-morning light, creeping up to the window of a handsome turn-of-the-century townhouse behind which little kids are excitedly whispering (the whole prologue has a languid, aristocratic feel to it - you think of Mann and Proust, a vanished age of dowagers and lorgnettes and little boys in sailor-suits). Clearly the work of a superb film-maker - but also of an intellectual manqué, shot through with bookish, undigested ideas that cut into its flow like bits of shell in a candy bar. Warm applause for a haunting, lilting theme tune ; weary groans for playing it every ten minutes.