GREEK FILM FESTIVAL: Writer-director Stelios Haralambopoulos’ The Signature is an uneven blend of tragic love story and murder mystery where the identities of the victim and perpetrator are cunningly teased out.
Set in the art world, the film is built on an intriguing premise and features strong performances from the two leads but the pacing is painfully slow until the denouement. The dialogue is often banal and too many scenes are inconsequential or needlessly drawn out: not quite like watching paint dry, but dangerously close at times.
Haralambopoulos is a prolific director whose credits include the 1996 feature Hades, TV miniseries The Antennas of Our Time and documentaries The Night Fernando Pessoa Met Constantine Cavafy, Yannis Moralis, Painter and Light on My Shoulder - Michalis Ganas.
For such an experienced filmmaker, this movie is sorely lacking in narrative drive and rhythm, and suspense.
Alexia Kaltsiki plays Anna, a youngish, highly attractive art historian who’s hired to work on an exhibition dedicated to famous artist Maria Dimou, who died in mysterious circumstances years earlier. Anna contacts Maria’s former lover Angelos (Georges Corraface), who’s ill with an unspecified disease.
Gradually Angelos unburdens himself to Anna, recounting how he met and fell in love with Maria (Maria Protopappa) in Paris when her career was starting to take off and he was a graphic artist.
Poking around Angelos’ apartment while he’s rushed to hospital, Anna discovers he possesses more of Maria’s paintings than he had admitted, and the artist’s signature was freshly painted on some.
So she sets out to establish the truth behind the paintings and what happened to Maria. Angelos confides that he and Maria were blissfully happy until they enlisted the help of a young architect, Dimitri (Nikos Kouris), a former flame of hers, to renovate their dilapidated dwelling, a former railway station. The film establishes that Dimitri’s hobby is target shooting, a heavy-handed hint of things to come.
Haralambopoulos switches seamlessly from the present to flashbacks, using some inspired segues. But the plot is often unfocussed and the dramatic pay-off is a long time coming.
Corraface is superb as a sensitive guy who has long harboured secrets and who made sacrifices in the cause of love, well matched by Protopappa as an earthy, strong-willed woman who’s forced to compromise her principles.
Corraface and Protopappa have a warm, relaxed rapport until their characters’ relationship sours. One lovemaking scene in Angelos’ aunt’s house in the country is passionately steamy, during which a cock crows: a deft touch.
As Anna, Kaltsiki isn’t asked to do much more than serve as an amateur sleuth initially, then as a sympathetic listener, but she has a beguiling presence. Her character would have benefited from having some sort of back story, perhaps involving the unseen Kostas to whom she speaks briefly on a mobile phone.
Kouris’ Dimitri is underwritten, restricted chiefly to scowling and looking jealous and resentful.
Elias Kostandakopoulos’s cinematography is a plus, his exterior shots reinforcing the film’s grey, melancholy mood.
