Audience Member
I think we can find something fresh in this film
This film never forces the feelings or emotions.
But it's terribly sad and despressed.
I think the most important ability of film director is to express feelings naturally
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
01/22/23
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Audience Member
Apart from the tonnes of countless visual metaphorical symbolism, The Weeping Meadow is a story of despair. Theodoros Angelopoulos is a patriotic man who devotes to make the dark history of Greece, his beautiful homeland to the audience with his stunning cinematography. Despite shot in an ultra slow manner and thousands of similar meaningless long takes, the director's homeland of flesh and blood is gradually developed. Unlike Denis Villeneuve's Incendies which the grievances erupted all of a sudden, Angelopoulos's sorrow is predestined and well-foreshadowed beforehand, but only if you have concentrated enough will you gradually feel the pain like Eleni. With the heartbreaking theme score by Eleni Karaindrou, the modern Greek tragedies are retold with the unique historical background of Greece itself, stabbing your heart and haunting your soul for long.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
02/25/23
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Audience Member
5-5-13 ????? ????? ?????? ?????????
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
02/03/23
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Audience Member
When the long takes rules the film! Recommended for long take heads!!
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
01/15/23
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Audience Member
so dramatic and so sad story
beautiful and awesome
music is also fantastic!
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
02/17/23
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Audience Member
I usually don't post reviews, but seeing comments about "superficial narrative" and "don't relate to Greece", I could not let this one go by. I've seldom seen movie this scrupulous, with exact metaphors, so analytical and yet so dramatic. There are emotional movies, there are rational narratives streamed on screen, here Theo got 2 in 1.
Movie starts with broken connection between past (father Spyros) and present (son Alexis). Greece (Eleni) is married to past, but doesn't want it, can't live with it. It is Eleni and Alexis that hope to uncover "origin of the river". Eleni's love is already with Alexis, she conceives her future (twins) with Alexis. That future is un-acceptable to Spyros, "he would kill him", if he could, so they have to hide them out of view. Spyros is lonely, he has his own traumatic past (wife lost in great purge), he needs Eleni too.
So Eleni runs away to Alexis. There is no road between the past and the present, you have to swim through river of memory. Rather boat through it, the only person that can enter that river is Spyros, others can only boat through it. Culture (musicians) is the only vehicle that drives between two and they pick up young couple, otherwise there is no road between old village and present city of Thessaloniki.
Things are not good with modern (1920ies) Greece (Thessaloniki) either. Economy is in shambles, playing in taverns is not music and above all, sin of abandoned past (Spyros) persecutes. There is a dream (America), there is hope but there is unresolved conflicts (social conflict, we get echoes), lack of understanding, these are costs of a sin, sin of killed father, of forgotten past.
Spyros and Alexis (past and present) never talk. One can't even say that they have conflict, other than loving the same Eleni, one Greece for two different paradigms. If they ever talked, if their relationship ("conflict") was understood, it might as well expire. One who lived in country with generational gap knows what I mean. Probably this muteness is perceived by some viewers as "undeveloped characters". This are not so much characters, these figures are decomposition of history, of human perception and there is no understanding of them as that understanding never happened. And it's not that there is something to understand, some metaphysical truth to uncover, rather its choices to be made. They (father and son, old and new ways, gendarmes and trade unions) have to decide, agree on how things will be done, who will be father to Eleni and who will be her husband. They try, but they can't. Father comes and tries to dance under son's music, but it doesn't work out, Eleni doesn't want him. Eleni and Alexis have to let past go, its forgotten, sacrificed, Spyros dies right there, when people finally seemed to enjoy themselves in new dancing Greece. But resolving this conflict (killing father, moving on) doesn't work either. When Young couple tries to take the ancestral house and livelihood, the family tree carries the blood of sacrificed past (Spyros's herd). There at last they get their kids (twins), killing past allows to move with future, but at too high of a price. Can't live with sin, traumatic memories flood the space of past, "the others" know about the sin and stone house windows. Trauma is not resolved, it's just forgotten, muscled out. Memory, space of past is flooded. They have to flee blind, ground slips under them, shore ahead is covered in the mist. Only very late in the movie same crowd reappears on that shore, only to mourn their dead.
Killing of the father, forgetting and ignoring past conflicts and trauma are also suicide of "feeble modern democracy". Nikos (the fiddler, Karaindrou's tune, what little is left of cultural heritage) dies in ephemeral land of waving blankets. Greece is abandoned and its body unravels (unfinished knitting and broken thread) while Alexis boards his dream, marvelous liner to America. Present disappears never to have it again. From letters we know that dream (America) did not live up to be what was hoped for. In reality it was dirty and violent. Rationality, culture disappears, replaced by fake dream. Consequences are dire. When two futures, twins meet on the battlefield, there is no father to reason with them. There is no past, no knowledge to resolve their conflict. They kill each other. Greece is jailed in madness, in lost reason and exterminating conflict.
This last bit - you might agree with it, you might not. Theo said in many different places that to him Greece is dead, he toasted his death by taxi driver in Eternity and a day. For Eleni all the guards in jail, they are all the same. German, American, what we take as an appearance of order and welfare, Theo rejects this, this is not living to him. Seems a bit overly dramatic, if not inaccurate, isn't it? There is someone living in modern Greece after all. Another person comes to my mind, my countryman - Mamardashvili, who on number of occasions said that all he sees is dead people, generation of dead. What makes them dead? Inability to extract knowledge out of experience of history. I never bought that, I thought that overly dramatic, if not inaccurate. Is it?, Not for Theo, his magic with space and time can handle this too.
The reality splits in the end. There are two perspectives. Eleni thinks (sees) her children die in civil war. On the other hand twins, while at war, while in nightmarish life (Balkan reality we've also seen in other movies), they still think their mother died, while they are here and now. We, who see the movie, on this side of the split, we think we are alive. For Theo we are dead. Our renewal through permanent killing of past, through eternal inner conflict and rebirth, change through self-extermination, this is not life. All the uniforms are the same, we are jailed in our insanity. What we call welfare society is a jail of insanity for him. What is life for Theo?
Voice of dead man reaches us through Alexi's letter, the very end. All three of them, with Spyros, going up the river and finding their origin, understanding what they are, seeing the meadow. Life, as it could be, alive.
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
01/21/23
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