It’s boring, but is it art?

Jim Emerson at Scanners has called for a “Contrarianism Blog-a-Thon” today. Other than send my system’s spell check into a tizzy, it’s intended as a forum to shed light either on our guilty or guilt-free pleasures (pictures that few others are able to appreciate in the proper spirit), or whatever pretentious or simple-minded beast everyone else seems to think is great (but we know isn’t). To wit:

In thirty years of writing on the movies, only a handful of films have been difficult for me to write something, anything, about. Last November I was sent a DVD screener of Theo Angelopoulos’s The Weeping Meadow, and was so horrifyingly bored that I felt that all film in general was no longer worth writing about. It sapped me to the core. Surely this was art, no? Surely others — those academics who sit around counting frames with a stopwatch, perhaps? — who saw it and wrote about it would proclaim it as a fine work. But, to me, it felt so familiar…hadn’t I seen all these images before, over and over, years ago? Hadn’t this sort of thing been done to death already...and better, by Antonioni and Dreyer? Whatever. I was unable to finish my review, but the manuscript below — representing some eight weeks of joyless toil — has been sitting around waiting for me to guide it to its end. Out with it already! I can’t even reread it…and I’m certain what follows is just as pretentious as the film itself.

The first film in a projected trilogy about Greek living and culture throughout the twentieth century, Theo Angelopoulos’s The Weeping Meadow (2004) spans thirty years, from the Greco-Turkish War through World War II and the beginning of the Greek Civil war. Meticulous in its visual detail and obviously heartfelt, it strives to convey the pain and suffering of the displaced masses searching for stability, a place to call home amid the shifting bureaucracy and exploding bombs.

Admittedly indebted to Homer and The Odyssey, Angelopoulos thrives in the ‘quest’ genre: Landscape in the Mist (1988), Eternity and a Day (1998), and the quasi-autobiographical Ulysses’ Gaze (1995)—that last one featuring Harvey Keitel as a filmmaker tracking down the cradle of cinema to a remote corner of Greece—trace displaced spirits weathering their own individual odysseys. But they’re also situated at a distance from the viewer, and rarely earn the compassion Angelopoulos clearly desires. So dour and obsessive, it’s difficult to muster any empathy as their dreams and realities fall to hardship.

In what is perhaps his most linear narrative to date, The Weeping Meadow follows a young woman (played by Alexandra Aidini) and her lover (Nikos Poursadinis) from a nomadic childhood to a turbulent midlife, forever wandering, hunted by her first husband (the young man’s father and her foster father), incarcerated, flooded out of shantytowns, his leaving for work in America, the deaths of their sons in the battlefield, the ongoing travails of a glorified soap opera.

Despite the attention given to time and place and event, Angelopoulos is less concerned with constructing coherent drama than in orchestrating a series of calculated, painterly scenes imagined through jaundiced nostalgia. Just figuring out when or where any given scene is supposed to be set requires a guidebook.

In the tradition of the medieval classics, it’s poetic in the best and worst sense of that word. It strives to recreate pain and suffering, and revels in depictions of primeval travel—relentlessly slow, meditative images of boats rowing from one side of the screen to the other, impeccably staged and framed, often from a single camera and with a minimum of cuts. If there were any humor in this film, any at all, these ponderous passages could evolve into a running gag.

Not content to simply recount a compelling chapter in history or perhaps wary of his shortcomings as a storyteller, Angelopoulos freely segues from narrative to allegory with scant success. The precise blocking of actors and camera, the triumphant combination of lighting, set design and aperture to evoke a sepia-toned memory, the performers expertly locked in bemusement: all these things deserve far more than the hammering negativity of a woefully naïve scenario.

During an isolated instance when Aidini steps into the frame smiling, the sight is absurdly incongruous. Why she’s smiling is never explained, for the film has no patience for joy or happiness, nor does it realize humor or irony in the face of adversity, otherwise pivotal elements in the narrative form. Far worse, however, is the blundering use of that smile as a bridge to more tragedy. In the hands of Bergman or Polanski these things could be used to scrutinize a character’s persona, but not here. It’s difficult to sympathize when the woman loses her sons: Angelopoulos has done nothing to establish their bond or show their growth. His inept handing of chronology and personality has robbed them of relevance.

Author’s note: That’s as far as I could go. Flush this review down the toilet. I’m finished.

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