GREEK FILM FESTIVAL: Not a single frame of Christos Nikoleris’ debut feature rings particularly true, but the heightened reality that he creates in retelling Romeo and Juliet on the streets of Athens pulses with an entirely watchable energy. Bolstered by two charismatic, sexy lead performances and drawing upon racial tensions that impact Greek society, Nobody probably won’t win any critics prizes but it might feature in audience-voted awards.
Julia (a frail but feisty Georgina Liossi) is a 17-year-old virgin seeking any path out of her staid life as the daughter of a strict Albanian Muslim family; 'Nobody’, aka Goran (Antinoos Albanis), was able to drag himself away from a Russian petty-crim circle, to secure a law degree, whereas his best friend Merkut (Nikolas Papagiannis) served hard time. Julia and Goran meet-cute (once too often, in real terms) and are soon intertwined in an ongoing complex familial/social struggle that might seem pertinent to contemporary Greek audiences but does not travel well.
The film’s energy is supplied by sequences that play directly to the Fast and the Furious crowd; the bad boys from both ethnic enclaves define their masculinity via muscle car manifestations of their dribbling testosterone. Nikoleris’ cross-cutting draws comparisons between Julia’s deflowering and the thrill of illegal street racing; watching both the hotted-up cars and Liossi’s writhing back muscles will appeal to the eye of the target audience, but they don’t really add a great deal to the progression of the drama.
The film was one of the last to be produced by the Greek arm of Australian production/distribution giant Village Roadshow. (The leading Oz film outfit divested itself of all domestic Greek interests in August 2009.) Some of the 27-year-old Australian company’s biggest local hits have been rebellious teen dramas (Street Hero, 1984; The Delinquents, 1989), so it is no surprise that the scenes between Albanis’ Nobody (so named after the lead’s obsession with Homer’s classic text The Odyssey) and Liossi’s Julia are the film’s most convincing. But much of the characters’ authenticity is undone by thinly-etched support roles that achieve little more than advancing stock stereotypes and manoeuvring the story towards its inevitable finale (staged in the most unusual of ways for those familiar with William Shakespeare’s source material).
Nikoleris’ direction seems to favour the 'moment’ rather than the whole; he can capture the pulsating heart of any given scene but seems incapable of melding it with the need to progress the narrative. Nobody is a cracking soap opera that ensures the audience wants to find out what happens next, but it is not a film that means very much beyond the frame it inhabits.
Those who favour such attributes may rate the film higher; others will pine for a deeper exploration of the racial and societal conflicts that impact the characters but which are fleetingly addressed. Nobody is a visceral joy, but never convinces as an intellectual exercise.
