By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 3 cats
Director: Theo Angelopoulos
Starring: Alexandra Aidini | Giorgos Armenis | Nikos Poursadinis
Original language title: Trilogia I: To Livadi pou dakryzei
Country: france, greece, italy
Year: 2005
Running time: 170
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0366721/combined
Bruce says: “TRILOGY: THE WEEPING MEADOW begins with a group of Greek refugees from Odessa who have fled the Bolshevik revolution and are now approaching Thessalonica where they will ultimately settle in the mud flats along the river. The image of this group clad in black as they move towards the water is eerie and lovely, typically Angelopoulos. Other masterful images in the film also involve water. One involves a funeral barge floating down the river as the townspeople row black boats carrying long staffs with black funeral flags waving in the breeze. The rowers make fantastic patterns as the oversized oars are silhouetted along with everything else in black. A third image involves a village of homeless people. The foreground is two pair of train tracks surrounded by grey gravel. Behind is a field of white sheets billowing in the wind as they are supported by rough twig poles. In the distance lies the ocean. There are comparable images (comparable in their ability to stick in one’s mind) in the other two Angelopoulos films I have seen, ETERNITY AND A DAY and THE SUSPENDED STEP OF THE STORK.
“Here, the central character is Eleni who at the age of three was found as she lay crying over her mother’s dead body in Odessa. She is rescued by a family with a boy only slightly older. She falls in love with him, then and there. As teenagers they begin their sexual life together and Eleni becomes pregnant. She is sent away due to ‘illness.’ Her twin boys are delivered in another town. She is forced to give up the boys for adoption and she returns home. When her stepmother dies Spyros (Vassilis Kolovos), her step father, decides he will marry Eleni instead of allowing Eleni to marry his son (Nikos Poursadinis), the father of her children. On her wedding day, immediately after the wedding ceremony Eleni runs off in her wedding dress and meets her stepbrother. The wedding musicians facilitate the escape. At first the lovers end up in an abandoned opera house where each of 85 families is assigned their own box. (Another stunning image.) Spyros tracks them down and they are on the run once again. They end up living in a village inhabited by the homeless.
“How she and her lover find their children back and get them back is never explained. When World War II approaches Greece becomes a political hotbed. One of the musicians (Giorgos Armenis) is a member of the Popular Front. Mussolini is approaching and the Greek army is confused by it all. Jailed for harboring a political criminal, Eleni spends four years in prison. Much of this is very fuzzy and vague. Suddenly Eleni’s lover has gone to America, enlisted in the US army and dies in Okinawa. And her sons both die fighting on opposite sides. How that all happened is unexplained. Earlier, as small children, the twins were inseparable.
“If Angelopoulos has a second career as a painter, I would not be surprised. His sense of composition is magnificent. As visually stunning as Angelopoulos can be, the narrative is sorely lacking in this film. While the camera slowly pans across vista after vista and zooms in and out from its subjects, it appears that the director has absentmindedly strayed from the story. If Angelopoulos could only spend a fraction of the time on his narrative that he spends on his images what a treat that would be. The acting in TRILOGY: THE WEEPING MEADOW is not sensational. In particular, Alexandra Aidini as Eleni delivers a weak performance. Angelopoulos doesn’t let us see inside his characters. Where the actors are standing when the scene is shot seems the priority. 3 cats
“This film was shown at the 2004 Toronto International Film Festival”