To meteoro vima tou pelargou

Plot synopsis:
The film opens with a fade-in on helicopters circling over what turns out to be dead bodies floating in the sea at Piraeus, the port of Athens. The main character, Alexander, a television reporter (Gregory Karr), explains in a voice-over that he was on his way to a border town to do a story on refugees. The bodies are those of stowaways who were refused asylum by the Greek authorities, and rather than be returned to their own countries, jumped to their deaths. The reporter sets up the theme of the film as he wonders, How does one leave? Why? To where?In the second scene, Alexander is now near the Greek-Albanian border, accompanied by a Greek colonel (Ilias Logothetis). After passing a few troops in review, during which the soldiers make totally incongruous remarks, they walk to a bridge which fords a river separating Albania from Greece. The colonel points out a tricolor line which bisects the bridge. He lifts one leg, as if to take a step over the line, but his leg remains suspended as he says, If I take one more step, Im elsewhere, or I die. The Albanian guards are somewhat nervous and on alert. The colonel stands still in that position for a moment, and then slowly brings his leg back into Greece.The two men next drive into the small border village nicknamed the waiting room, where, the colonel explains, thousands of refugees are stranded, waiting for the Greek authorities to give them their papers to go elsewhere. Alexander wanders along the riverfront market, where he spots for the first time a person he seems to recognize as a famous Greek politician (Marcello Mastroianni) who had inexplicably disappeared some time ago, and now seems to have resurfaced here, as an anonymous refugee. Later on, Alexander rejoins the rest of his crew at a local hotel, where they settle for the duration of their assignment. The entire crew walks to another section of the town, where they begin filming with a long tracking shot along a line of boxcars that have become the temporary shelter for refugees from all over Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the Middle East.Cut next to an elegant reception, in a town obviously not the waiting room, where Alexander has arranged to meet with the politicians French wife (Jeanne Moreau). She relates her husbands first temporary disappearance, after he had written a controversial book, Despair at the End of the Century, and his return as another man. In a close-up of the cover of the book, we see the portrait of the politician (Mastroianni). In the next scene, in Alexanders apartment, the politicians wife arrives and gives the reporter an audiotape that her husband made before leaving her for the second, and final, time. They listen to the tape and then go for a walk, during which the politicians wife provides more information about her husband and his strange behavior.Alexander returns to the waiting room. At the bar of the hotel where he and his crew stay, the crew members are drinking and dancing, while Alexander sits alone drinking at table. A young woman (Dora Chrisikou) at a nearby table stares insistently at him. Eventually, she follows Alexander back to his room. After she leaves, Alexander walks back to the row of boxcars, where he encounters the politician telling a young boy the story of the future Great Migration, but the man fails to reveal the storys ending. Some time later, Alexander meets the young woman in a café and then stalks her, following her as she returns to her building, a place where refugees live in crowded and tenuous conditions. When he enters her small room, she relates to him how her mother died while crossing the border, and she says she now takes care of her two younger siblings. The politician (her father?) enters and says that he has been at work repairing telephone lines which run along the border. Over a drink, the politician ponders his circumstances: We crossed the border, but were still here. How many borders must we cross before we are home?Alexander goes to the train station to meet the politicians wife. He has pre-arranged a chance meeting between the woman and the man he believes is her husband. This meeting takes place the next morning on a bridge in the town. The crew is filming the encounter, which is entirely seen through the cameras eye. The two stop, and for a brief moment, stare at each other. She then turns toward the camera and states, Its not him.We see some old original footage of the politician at a time when he was to make a very important speech to the Assembly, but instead just made a short statement and abruptly left. Following this scene, while standing by a river, Alexander confronts the politician with the tape recording he gave his wife before leaving her, but it produces no reaction on the politicians part. He simply ignores it. On returning to the village, Alexander meets up with the colonel, who has been all along commenting on the conditions of the waiting room and keeping Alexander informed of the latest gossip and happenings. He tells Alexander that there will be a wedding between a refugee girl from the village and her childhood sweetheart, who lives across the border. As they talk, the girl who is to be married enters the bar: it is the same girl Alexander slept with a few nights earlier. Alexander is obviously shaken. They meet again at his hotel, and we assume they will make love one last time.The next scene is one of the most remarkable of the film, a scene like only Angelopoulos can produce. On a grey, mournful morning, a small group assembles with the bride and her father -- the politician -- on the Greek shore of the river that marks the border. They face another small crowd standing on the opposite shore with the groom. When the Orthodox priest arrives, the wedding commences. It is eventually interrupted by a single gunshot, which disperses the two groups. That same evening, Alexander meets the bride, still in her wedding dress, who is dancing with her father.The next morning, Alexander returns to the bridge on the border and repeats the suspended step as acted out by the colonel at the beginning of the film. He meets the colonel, who tells Alexander that several people had seen the politician leaving the village by different means, in different directions, but all agreed that he was carrying a suitcase. The colonel further states that he is unable to confirm or deny these stories about the vanished politician.The film ends with another striking scene of men in yellow rain suits on the top of telephone polls which run along the border-river, stringing telephone wires from pole to pole.

Tags: philosophical

Review:
Having only ever seen one Angelopoulos film before - The Travelling Players, which thrilled me about as much as paint drying on a wall - I was unprepared for the revelation that is The Suspended Step of the Stork.
Shot over a decade ago, this long metaphysical tale of desperate refugees and disenchanted politicians has become more contemporary with each intervening year.
As if a lone Greek film-maker had somehow prophesied the horrors of Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq - and the creeping paralysis that has overtaken Western democracy.It begins in a refugee camp on the Greek-Albanian border, where a TV journalist spots an elderly man (Marcello Mastroianni) and decides he is a leading politician who went missing years before.
Tracing the man's 'widow' (Jeanne Moreau) the reporter gropes his way towards the film's central dilemma.
What could make a progressive intellectual lose all faith in humanity, to the extent that he gives up not only his political career but also his very identity?This sounds like dry stuff indeed, and so it might be without the alchemical power of Angelopoulous's camera.
The tracking-shot along a disused train, each carriage inhabited by a penniless refugee family.
The wedding across the river, with bride and groom stranded on opposite sides by the arbitrary idiocy of national borders, which veers perilously close to kitsch but never succumbs.Moreau is magnificent, Mastroianni his genial hangdog self, but neither actor could ever mistake this film for a star vehicle.
On first viewing, this was not an Angelopoulos film I loved.
A journalist is tracking Marcello Mastroianni, who may or may not be a famous politician and philosophic author who simply vanished one day, to a refugee zone on the edge of the Greek border, where he lives in squalor with the others there.
The problem, for me, was that the Mastroianni mystery was far less powerful and interesting then the stories of those around him, who aren't refugees by choice, but in order just to survive.
So, for me, it felt we were focused on the wrong plot, or certainly the more intellectual, less moving one.Also, the dubbing of Mastroianni is pretty awful, to the point of being distracting.
Oddly, that's something I didn't find in the earlier "The Beekeeper" (in fact, it was so good in that film, I thought perhaps Mastroianni spoke Greek, and was able to do his own lines).
But on second viewing I realized the film is really a chance for Angelopoulos to ask important and pointed questions about the nature of borders; national, emotional, racial, from ourselves, between men and woman.
The 'main plot' is just the skeleton to hang the meat of the film on.
An amazing tracking shot as the camera goes by box car after box car housing refugees from different places, deliberately and chillingly recalling the trains of German WWII, as if to ask, have we really left that past behind?
The wordless slow seduction of the journalist in a restaurant is odd, and amazingly tense, as the two people simply look at each other in fairly wide shot for the longest time, the tiniest shifts in body language and facial expression telling the kind of story that is usually filled with bantered pointless dialogue.
And the film's opening and closing images are particularly powerful.
Seeing it again, knowing up front the film wasn't really about the mystery it sets up, didn't solve all my problems with it, but certainly made it a much stronger experience the 2nd time around..
I was eager to get into it, as it featured Mastroianni, one of my favorite actors and was a film By Theo, of whom I've heard a lot.
The opening was promising, a long shot over a jeep of soldiers across the Albanian-Greek border.
The main plot of the story is revealed to the journalist by the old woman.
It's like a 15 minutes monologue, killing the action and viewers patience, nothing happening on screen for 15 or even 20 minutes, apart this old lady telling a story.
A lot of problems with the story-telling, it went from absurd to irrational never sticking to a style, making the viewer asking questions that never got answers.
On the other hand, as many Greeks or Albanians or Balcan people would agree with, the movies showed lot of historic, ethnic, or politically incorrectness, just for the sake of making a movie about "humanity" as a red in another review.
A lot more to say, but no time to lose on a poor movie, which was not movie at all, but lunacies of a person impressed on film and paid with state money..
As with all of Angelopoulos' films, "The Suspended Step of the Stork" implicitly demands a close and intimate participation on the part of the viewer, a fact that has certainly contributed to the limited popularity of his work.
The filmmaker prefers to keep the viewers away from their own emotional responses, and instead forces them to explore and study the characters' identities for themselves.
As a result, the acting is understated and implicit, as opposed to overt and explicit.The action scenes are set between long intervals of contemplation, where the viewer is asked to become a participant, to participate as an actor, by probing his or her own psyche.
As in a novel, where the drama rests entirely on the author's writing to provide a template where the reader's imagination and/or past experience flourish, Angelopoulos' drama rests within his images: his uses of the long shots, the long takes, the leisurely pacing, the sparing dialogues that have become his trademark, inviting the viewer to experience the film from his or her personal perspective.
Angelopoulos uses silence to capture moments of high intensity, reverting to the non-verbal language of gestures, gazes, sounds, and music, when he believes that words can only take us so far.The music, by Angelopoulos' long time collaborator, Eleni Karaindrou, provides more than just a discreet background, but becomes itself a dramatic element of the story.
A large part of the film consists of exterior shots in subtle, subdued colors, recorded in a drab winter light.
Angelopoulos presents us with an "other Greece," one far different from the Greece of the tourist brochures, with ethereal blue skies and emerald seas, drowned in an eternal sunshine.
Angelopoulos' genius through Arvanitis' camera is on display throughout the film."The Suspended Step of the Stork" is above all else a political statement aimed at the socio-political situation in the Balkans at the end of the twentieth century.
In the "waiting room" facing the Albanian border, the refugees, political or other, outcast by the rest of humanity, wait.
Although Angelopoulos' political views are well known, the film steers clear of any political discourse regarding the causes of the refugees' plights.
In the process, Angelopoulos forces us to meditate on the concepts of geographical, cultural, political, and personal "borders." Angelopoulos considers himself a historian of twentieth century Greece, and he likes to bring lessons from the Hellenic myths into his discussions.
In this film, he does some border crossing himself between the Greek and Italian cultures, drawing from a combined Homeric and Dantesque tradition of Odysseus' travel.
Alexander is a Telemachus, in search of a story about an aging Greek politician/Odysseus who disappeared, never to be heard of again.
This political man, a brilliant orator, unexpectedly and inexplicably left the comfort of his bourgeois existence, his wife, and his brilliant career, to live anonymously in a refugee camp with the lowest of the low.
Of course, the "politician" is not Alexander's father, but the "politician" stands before Alexander like a father figure/Odysseus.
As with Homer's Telemachus, Alexander grows as a person during his odyssey.Of course, it would be wrong to try and see in the film a retelling of Homer's Odyssey in a contemporary context.
Angelopoulos draws on Odysseus's travels only as structuring and thematic elements for his film.
In Angelopoulos' ending, "Odysseus" is more like the Dante's Odysseus: he does not leave for Ithaca but goes on, "carrying a suitcase." And Alexander/Telemachus is "suspended" between returning to his home and his career, or embarking on a voyage to "somewhere else." He states as much, in a voice-over at the beginning of the film, paraphrasing few lines from Dante's "Inferno": "And don't forget that the time for a voyage has come again.
The wind blows your eyes far away." Finally, although Angelopoulos is not a religious person, there is a Greek Orthodox religious theme introduced during the film in the form of the yellow-suited linesmen, who go around bettering things for their fellow human beings by reconnecting communications, and also the Christ-like figure of the "politician." In the final scene, these men in yellow demonstrate once more the Byzantine iconography's influence in Angelopoulos' work.
They appear like "stylites," religious figures found in the Orthodox tradition, solitary and fervent men who took up their abode upon the tops of pillars, in a form of asceticism.The film ends without a resolution as to the true identity of the character played by Mastroianni.
Angelopoulos does not give us any clues, and the wife's statement, "It's not him," is far from convincing and left ambiguous enough.
The important question of the film is not whether he is or is not the vanished politician, but that he could be the politician.
But the film still ends on an optimistic note.
Whereas the wires strung from pole to pole run only along the river, and thus communications across the border are still not possible, and it remains impenetrable, we note that this final scene is taken from a point of view across the river: the camera has crossed the border, and the reverse tracking shot is inviting Alexander and the viewer to follow beyond the boundary.
On this account, Angelopoulos gives us hope that somehow, some of the borders will eventually crumble..
A most recommendable masterpiece, not only for the underlying themes of the story but also for the unmatchably brilliant and ingenious picture work of Angelopoulos, not to mention the acting of giants, Mastroianni and Moreau, and the remarkable character play by Ilias Logothethis.
Gregory Karr's performance may seem overshadowed by his "tough" partners' at first stance but in fact he perfectly plays his character, which is revealed in his very last scene with the girl (Khrysikou) and the man (Mastroianni), albeit hinted beforehand.
But the film includes -in addition to the standard Greek and English speaking- fragments spoken in Albanian, Kurdish and Turkish, which will be attractive for those who are charmed by the beauty in hearing various languages..
The music, by Angelopoulos' long time collaborator, Eleni Karaindrou, is, as usual, superb.
While Angelopoulos films do not use music as innovatively as Werner Herzog's films, nor as pop culturally as Martin Scorsese's films, few films marry image and emotion with sound and well.
And, of course, there is the Angelopoulos long take, provided by cinematographers Giorgos Arvanitis and Andreas Sinanos.
Whereas the long takes of an Antonioni are wrought with tension, and those of a Bela Tarr are often elliptical in space and feeling, Angelopoulos's are purely emotional, and often use symbolism.
A good example of this comes in the final scene, after the reporter is done with the refugee, the town, the border, and the colonel.
In fact, their very muteness and lack of motion make them even more impotent; as if guidons to some cause that simply is, but cannot affect, or musical notations sans sound.
Another scene is a long tracking shot of boxcars where the Albanian refugees live.
An accordion plays a folk song, and as the camera tracks it feels as if the hapless people are moving (and the deliberate iconography of the World War Two Nazi railroads to death camps lends a sense of hopelessness to their plight).
The riverside wedding scene, also done virtually wordlessly, is another example of Angelopoulos's mastery of cinema, and is a key scene, for similar riverside scenes figure prominently in his earlier Landscape In The Mist and later Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow.
The scenes in these films are so similar that one almost feels they are prefigurations, or connecting devices between the films, as if the Angelopoulos canon is one extended, ongoing film, not separate works of art.
The acting, done from a distance, and using the whole body, still conveys powerful emotions, and is lacking any musical score- only the sounds of nature (the wind, river, etc.) abound.
I cannot recall any Hollywood film that would do such a thing- cast big name stars like Mastroianni and Moreau, and then not take 'advantage' (in the traditional sense) of their 'star power.' But it works, nonetheless, for this is a film that is so well wrought that, in essence, any actors could have stepped in and done a good job (recall my claim of being on autopilot; but in the best sense), for the lack of emoting via facial expressions, and the deliberate interchangeability of characters and actors is another element of the film that aids its universality.But, above all, all of these techniques are simply variations on the obliquity of moment I mentioned earlier.
A seemingly familiar scene is set, but then plays out slightly differently than expected.
A final example comes in a scene midway through the film, and one that is an astonishing long take.
After some ethnic tensions in the town, between refugees, a man's body is found hanged, dangling from the end of a crane.
As the body comes to earth, the camera leaves the scene, and follows the reporter, as a train pulls in slightly farther down the tracks.
He is there to greet the Greek politician's wife, before she is to 'confront' the Albanian refugee.
Still, that the camera never breaks away from the reporter, and all this plays out in the background, is a virtuoso achievement in technical, emotional, and narrative terms.Even the film's title, The Suspended Step Of The Stork, is oblique.
Yes, there is the obvious reference to the way the colonel and reporter both hold their legs up over the border line, but it can also be referring to the suspended life of the Greek politician- a man whose life seemed a thing of beauty and hope for the Greeks, yet is frozen in the diegetic history of the film- or not?, if one believes that the refugee really was the politician.
Fortunately, such a freeze does not affect the viewer, for The Suspended Step Of The Stork is a masterpiece of a film.
True, many video game style Hollywood action and adventure film addicts will not 'get it,' but who really gives a damn what such folk think?
They are the unobliqued in life, and this film shows how little such really matters, in the long run or short..
The suspended step of a director running out of things to say...
Answer: by turning it into an existential alienation parable.Yes, we're back in the early 90s, just after the disintegration of the Eastern block and the subsequent flooding of immigrants in the European Union, and what better way to deal with the subject than making a film about an existentially alienated middle-class journalist, an existentially alienated upper-class politician, his existentially alienated rich wife, and so on.In the background, immigrants are asking for political asylum in an unnamed Greek village near the borders.
I mean honestly, the scene where some top-ranking army-officer curses his destiny cause he sent his daughter to study in London is enough to make you puke.Anyway, it can't be that bad, Angelopoulos is a master of the cinematic art after all, right ?
Remarkable film where the camera does almost all of the work.
Poignant ending as what must have seemed a symbol of hope now looks like a commentary on a Europe about to revert to tribalism and cold, cruel borders.
The central plot about the disappeared politician doesn't seem central or integrated to the rest of the film: Moreau and Mastroianni are almost wasted, despite their strong, understated performances.
The film moves because of its uncanny sense of atmosphere: bleak, impoverished life on the edge which might be that of refugees anywhere today.
Elsewhere, the sounds of the river and the wind recall moments in Antonioni.
A film which may be more powerful now than when it was conceived..
But how many borders must we pass to go to our home?This particular phrase from the unforgettable Theo Angelopoulo's film sums up the whole meaning of the film and the Trilogy of borders.Alexandros a TV reporter armed with the energy of the youth seeks a missing politician in a border town.The town is full of people from many ethnicities among them there is the politician(Marcelo Mastoioanni).His character a talented writer and politician disappears mysteriously and leaves everything behind to seek the very place which will make him happy,he seeks a home.The film title is a reference on the fatal step that people may take to cross the borders literally and not,the thoughts in that hour and danger of doing the step or fending off from it.Mastoioanni's character for another time in the end of the film takes the step of the stork and goes in another journey crossing borders once more.One of the best movies of Theo Angelopoulos.Unlikely from the most of his films,here the dialog serves the plot smoothly.The actors marry words with emotions.The beautiful landscape photography makes the movie even more beautiful.Although as all Angelopoulos movies the action is reduced.The mainstream viewer might get bored as it is a cult film with deep emotional scenes.Humanism dominates as people are the center of the films's axis.People have to overcome all the borders in their way even if they are guarded from soldiers.The movie with a simple plot delivers deep messages who change everyones way of thinking.All in all one of the greatest Greek films of the century.Highlight of the film: The Suspended Step of the Stork on the board line of Evros and the odd wedding across the river.