THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
Aesthetic outfit, inspiration, sensitivity at the time: what more could you ask for, and which is however so rare, from a first feature film? We will therefore note, for the record, the name of the Greek Georgis Grigorakis, 38, who brings us on a set this beautiful film where tragedy, western and ecological fiber harmonize a little miraculously. In other words and in most cases, enough to crash a hundred times. Somewhere in the north of Greece, Nikitas, inconvenient loner, rifle by the side, living in a beautiful dilapidated house deep in the woods, fights day after day against the mining company who covets his land and implements, by maneuvers obscure and with the help of thugs in his pay, a constant and insidious violence against him.
Helped by a fragile handful of die-hards whom he finds at the village café, Nikitas must also fight on another front. Johnny, his son, whom he has not seen for twenty years, comes to live with him when his mother dies to demand his share of the inheritance. Continuously hostile to this father who turns a deaf ear and whose fight he does not understand, the boy is also recruited by the mining company which causes rain and good economic weather in the region. A generational conflict emerges as well, both at the level of the father-son couple and through the division of a population whose young people are the privileged recruits of the company.
One of the film’s most remarkable features is the very subtle way in which it distills its information, the deliberate impressionism that surrounds motivations and characters, as well as the slow reminiscences that emanate from a distant past. We thus understand, imperceptibly, that the utopian desire which pushed Nikitas to settle, with woman and child, closer to nature in the solitude of the forest, is precisely what made him lose almost everything, starting with his family.
Duality on several levels
Man is all the more determined to save what remains to him, his house precisely, in the face of the “monster”, as his opponents call it, in the face, in other words, of this predatory spirit of the capitalist system which , taking by the momentary windfall of a paid job in times of crisis, is actually embodied in the giant excavators which destroy natural resources and make the earth unlivable for all. But it is not the “message”, however correct it may be, which touches our sensitivity here and wins our conviction. It is the vigor and coherence of the aesthetic bias that seduces us and carries us along, in particular by making duality a central element of the film whose dialectic operates on several levels at the same time.
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