GREEK FILM FESTIVAL: What are the selection criteria for entry to one of Australia’s ever-expanding series of film festivals devoted to national cinemas? Does the film have to display some kind of outstanding or at least interesting qualities, or is it enough to simply represent a cross-section of that year’s output regardless of aesthetic quality or topical content and leave the rest for the local audience to decide?
This is not the place for a proper exploration of that question, but looking at this wan nod to Antonioni 50 years after the fact is to wonder why it was selected for this year’s Greek Film Festival program. I notice the festival website lists a couple of prizes it was awarded at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival. Perhaps it was a bad year.
The feature debut for Aris Bafaloukas concerns the relationship of Dimitirs (Sotiris Pastras), a swimmer in training for the European championships, and his girlfriend. Elsa (Youlika Skafida) is a Greenpeace campaigner investigating a possible link between the mysterious deaths of dolphins on a remote stretch of coast where military experiments are apparently being carried out in secret. She trains at the same pool as Dimitris because of her desire to be strong in the water during her campaigning activities. So why does she mysteriously disappear from the beach one night during an expedition with her associates?
That sounds like a reasonably productive set up for a thriller but that’s not what Bafaloukas had in mind. For most of its running time the film intercuts between three scenarios: (a) Dimitris’ obsessive training sessions, where he repeatedly spends up to four and a bit minutes underwater holding his breath (hence the title of Apnea); (b) the search for Elsa on the beach; and (c) flashbacks charting the pair’s relationship, from their first meeting to his later resistance to her associates’ attempts to get him to join their campaigning. Class references – his father is deeply in debt, her dad is a dentist – are sketched in lightly.
The search for Elsa is a clear reference to L’Avventura, Antonioni’s international breakthrough film of 1960, but inviting comparisons to that masterpiece of modernist cinema was not such a great idea. While the Italian master’s films of the early-to-mid Sixties contained scarcely a single image that was less than strikingly composed, here it is hard to find one. (The decision to film the coastal scenes using a sickly yellow-green filter is a particular turn-off that makes me wonder what on earth the director was thinking.)
Antonioni understood that the subtlety of his approach – where so much of the resonance came from the spaces between the actors, not to mention their relationship to their environment – required charismatic stars of the calibre of Monica Vitti, Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni. The downcast Pastras and equally glum Skafida may be good looking actors with bodies that look great in swimwear but they project little in the way of personality.
They are hardly helped by the film’s laboured use of metaphor. The apnea scenes are repeated endlessly, along with other clumsily symbolic moments dedicated to 'swimming against the current" and 'the inability to shout". With such a thin narrative it’s no wonder they fail to find purchase.