Eternity and Angelepoulos

In past, I made some futile efforts to write about the movie – Eternity and a Day and each time I was left with a vacant on the paper while scratching some misleading words on MS Word. Each time I felt there is still something missing in me to contact the sheer dimensions of this film; a work of fine art and every time I found myself adjusting once more before the screen, to watch a poetry lifted from dreams, drifting in ,which can shred all the logical existences in a day or in the eternity.

I generally don't feel to talk about the plot. But Eternity and a Day leaves such a punch, I should pen down the storyline in few words. Alexandros (played by European film staple Bruno Ganz) is an aging poet, suffering from a terminal disease and destined to stay in a hospital from tomorrow. He is apparently fated to die tomorrow or so, and we expend his final day trailing him from morning to next morning. For Alexandros, tomorrow is a meager 24 hour's day, or the eternity! We tag along the unfolding of the movie slowly; he meets an Albanian refugee boy and spends the day with him in a metaphysical journey. He saves the same kid when ready to be sold to foreigners. He visits the frontier of Albania looking like a Nazi camp with spectators watching while hanging on the wire fence. He speaks with Dionysios Solomos, a poet who used to pay people to acquire a word for poetic exploitation. Alexandros tracks his past, in customary intervals he congregates with the unread letter from his wife, he meets the symbols, the signs of the life and the morning comes again, for eternity.

Why the film is a stunner? Why the film leaves with such a bang into yourself that left you with relentless thinking and thinking? Is it due to the absolute performance of the actors? Or the magical theme music of Eleni Karaindrou? The poetic narration of the film? Or what it is?

The film handles flawlessly the concept of "time" and "symbols" in life. What is a day? ?Only a progression of 24 hours? The director addresses a day as a cyclic array of life, it moves round and round and while progressing, time meets with the past and present in a descriptive way. Remember, the shot where Alexandros and the boy take a trip in the bus and three bikers dressed in yellow follow them and make you feel "yes, this is the circle of life".

The bikers draw attention from Greek mythology, they are the daughters of necessity; they are the three forms of time, out of which human life is woven, past, present and future.

For an individual, the facade of "tomorrow" can be expressed in two ways, either tomorrow is an ordinary day or an eternity (since we don't know how tomorrow will last), we call for the force of "logos" to resolve this confused situation. For Alexandros, the use of logos, the accumulation of word-wealth, brings order to his disordered world. Alexandros remains the same old ill person, but the past remain alongside him in present day. Past events are now present in his mind. Is the time static?

The film canvasses for an eternal truth; change of appearances are mere illusion; but the existence is one.

Alexandros, wants as many words as he can find, to make intellect of the time he spends being alive. He is equipped to buy them (words like "outsider" or "very late") and expands his freedom, freedom from the tyranny of time, from the dictatorship of death. In the spirit of capitalism, he chases the footsteps of his predecessor, Dionysios Solomos who was buying words to write the Ode to Freedom that became the Greek National Anthem. Alexandar haplessly looks for words to save him in his awe.

In the end I believe Alexandros gained his liberty. At the dawn he was still making plans for tomorrow."Tomorrow" after all, did not appear for Alexandros the end of time. In the final shot, still somebody calls his name from the seaside..."alexandros"..."alexandros"... as in the beginning of the movie. Yet, again the concept of circle of life.

Personally, without any squabble, Eternity and a Day is one of the finest movies I ever saw. It is a clever blend of a poetry and a theatre. Theo Angelepoulos here draws the stringent line separating the "best" directors and the "master" of movie makers.

I can't award a 10/10 for this masterpiece, perhaps it is far ahead of all boundaries of evaluations.

Watch it, buy it, borrow it, beg it or steal it!
I salute Angelepoulos, I salute the grand-master.

Mia aioniotita kai mia mera
(Eternity and a Day -1998)
Directed By Theo Angelopoulos