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MovieMail's Review
Theo Angelopoulos has always refused to compromise in his discussion of recent Greek and European history and the relationship between myth, memory and mortality.
The second part of the trilogy started with The Weeping Meadow (2004) is certainly one of his more exacting pictures, as it shows how events like the death of Stalin, Watergate and the fall of the Berlin Wall impacted upon a couple kept apart by forces they could never hope to control. Indeed, even in making a movie about his parents (Michel Piccoli and Irène Jacob), American-Greek director Willem Dafoe has to leave the Cinecittà studio in Rome to go in search of his missing daughter in the German capital.
Eschewing the long takes that have become his trademark, yet still exhibiting a mastery of evocative imagery and emotive set-pieces, Angelopoulos brings a deeply personal intimacy to several epochal moments. Moreover, he coaxes a fine performance out of Bruno Ganz, as the elderly German Jew who has been devoted to Jacob over half a century of dramatic and often drastic transformation.
The Dust of Time is the second part of Angelopoulos' Trilogy, of which the first was The Weeping Meadow.
A (Willem Dafoe) - an American film director of Greek ancestry, is making a film that tells his story and the story of his parents, a tale that unfolds in Italy, Germany, Russia, Kazakhstan, Canada and the USA. The main character is Eleni (Irene Jacob), who is claimed and claims the absoluteness of love. At the same time the film is a long journey into the vast history and the events of the last fifty years that left their mark on the 20th century. The characters in the film move as though in a dream. The dust of time confuses memories. A. searches for them and experiences them in the present.
'Greece wounds me.' Not an EU finance minister, but Nobel prize-winning poet George Seferis on the nation’s then contemporary agonies. It’s a sentiment Greece’s greate... more >
'Greece wounds me.' Not an EU finance minister, but Nobel prize-winning poet George Seferis on the nation’s then contemporary agonies. It’s a sentiment Greece’s greatest film-maker shares. Few national cinemas have been shaped more profoundly by one director. But Theo Angelopoulos’ vision is hued in silvers and greys, underscored by a private and public sense of striving melancholy.
Palme d’Or winner for Eternity and a Day, creator over four decades of a filmic world view that envisions the past’s permanent presence in the lives and loves of his protagonists, Angelopoulos is heading towards completion of his Trilogy on 20th century Greek history, which opened with The Weeping Meadow (2004). This second instalment casts Willem Dafoe, Irene Jacob, Michel Piccoli and Bruno Ganz in a 50 year, multi-narrative exploration of emigration and memory.
Occupying territory formally co-habited by Antonioni and Jancso, this is cinema as praise song and elegy. It will play strongest to those committed to Angelopoulos’ particular reading of both film and place, but without such far-reaching visions, we are all reduced. < less
