GREEK FILM FESTIVAL: Political problems and economic collapse might be terrible for a nation’s inhabitants but they can be productive for a country’s filmmakers. Insensitive though it may appear to say this, pain and frustration feeds the urge to communicate and gives storytelling meaning and urgency.
About a decade ago we saw the rise of a down-to-earth and vigorous new wave of cinema from Argentina. We may be seeing it again with some of the cinema emerging from Egypt, which reflects the discontent that boiled over into the recent overthrow of Mubarak.
Now with Greece’s economic problems and social unrest hitting the headlines daily, this might be the moment for a new wave of tell-it-like-is cinema from that country.
45m2 (ie. 45 metres squared) is a clear case of a Greek filmmaker finding something interesting to say about the dilemmas and frustrations of a country’s Gen Y.
Christina (Efi Longinou) is a 23-year-old who works in a ritzy handbag shop, selling items she could never afford to buy herself. Like many of her generation, she’s never moved out from the parental home, which she shares with her well-meaning but nagging mother, a widow. One day she snaps and decides to start renting a spacious roof-top flat in a nice area, even though she can’t really afford it, and takes on a night job waitressing. But the long hours and lack of sleep make it harder to keep her day job.
Determined to live alone, she finds herself increasingly alienated from the trendy bars she’s been used to frequenting with her best girl friend and her soccer-obsessed boyfriend. What spare time she has, she increasingly spends by herself, nourishing her dreams of a more fulfilled life via the art books she finds in the boxes left behind by the previous tenant.
To its credit the film is not the simple-mindedly earnest plea against poverty it might have been. Writer-director Stratos Tzitzis is more concerned with the way that economic realities intersect with internal dreams and external lifestyles.
Christina is not so hard up that she can’t eat, and is never at risk of being homeless. She dresses in chic, well-cut clothes (no doubt bought from chain stores), and like pretty much everybody her age, owns a mobile phone – an item seen as a luxury only a generation ago.
What makes the film seem so authentic is its acutely well observed portrait of the emptiness of a 21st century consumerism run rampant. The film gives an almost palpable sense of what it must feel like to be young and Greek today
Rejecting the unattainable, materialistic and hedonistic dreams her generation is caught in, Christina starts to nurture her own alternative hopes. Her problem is she has no realistic way of turning them into reality. Why, if she is strapped for cash, does she strike out for independence by renting a relatively spacious, upmarket flat (see the title, which refers to its floor area) while not bothering to find a flat mate she can share the rent with? While some viewers might find that galling, it’s precisely the kind of contradiction that gives the film resonance.
There’s an odd sub-plot involving Christina’s apparently long-standing affair with a local councillor that’s under-developed, there to make a political point but in personal terms hard to fathom. But it’s a small flaw, and in any case, the content is not the only thing that gives the film its value. What I particularly admire is the way Tzitzsis’s sympathetic, informal direction perfectly matches the informality of the lives on display.
It’s easy to imagine this film coming out all inert and stodgy on a higher production budget. (See Apnea, also in the festival program, for an example of a more formal and old-fashioned style of filmmaking that drains all the youthfulness from its young protagonists.)
Instead, using mobile cameras without submitting to fashionable wobbly-cam, Tzitzis gets a totally convincing, street-level feel. Best of all, Longinou’s highly naturalistic performance vividly captures her character’s hopes and disappointments.
