Review by Beatrice On 11-Jul-2023
Friends, wives, children no longer exist My beard will not grow as well as my hair Hunters will not look for me They will find their dogs dead soon enough Their incisor teeth will fall in blood I will feed on men, birds, deer I will forget the words I will only howl In the rivers the night on the mountains at dawn My hands full of mud, sweat I will ingest the brown bears
In ancient Greece, orality was the preferred system of transmission of knowledge, and like an ancient aedo the friend recites these verses.
They are in the car and the 40-year-old protagonist listens raptly.
He lives in the car with which he delivers honey, food of the gods, and the narcoleptic and paranoid employer times his tardiness.
No one, as Ulysses called himself, sleeps in the car and puts his shoes outside at night.
His wife and children also live in another car where they throw him a birthday party with associated trout and candles.
This is the first decade of 2000, a time of economic recession in Greece.
He keeps going around the same traffic circle, invoking Cape Sunio where the Temple of Poseidon, the god of the sea, lies: No one is the new Odysseus, trying in vain to embark on his journey.
There is an injured man on the ground , four motorcyclists watch him, one of them hurling invective at the motorists; No one watches.
Nobody is a new Ulysses forced to change his mode of transportation to a motorcycle because of competition and to sing like an ancient aedo about his impossible adventure.
Makridis before Miserere, tells the Odyssey of a man in search of his identity.
He wrecks his car to initiate himself into motorcycling, scalding his leg on the tailpipe; he swaps his shoes for boots while the world's best skipper tests non-slip shoes on a boat.
He sleeps on the motorcycle; his wife, far from the Penelope weaving and unweaving the web, despises him and leaves with the children.
No one will wait for No one,
O magnificent and stormy sea Why did you kill thousands If you did not exist there would be no beaches nor submarines You cover the best part of the planet You give salt, energy, we can swim...
The contemporary Ulysses is on a boat in the harbor, not knowing where to go, staring and singing at the magnificent sea.
Babis Makridis, a surprising artist of the new generation of Greek filmmakers continually reckons with a humanity challenged by irreversible existential dynamics.
Through the portrayal of serious, dramatic and extremely believable faces he presents absurd, surreal and tragicomic situations where the sea, Greece, mythology, history point to a new horizon and where the sky and the sea no longer find their meeting point.
Co-written with Lanthimos collaborator Efthymis Filippou, L indicates in Learning, the impossibility of knowledge where there is nothing left to learn; Plato's cave is now the human condition.
Learning, not giving life lessons, builds a contemporary portrait of the new aimless heroes, with a careful and forgiving look at those who do not know and cannot see the return from a journey without Ithaca.
11-Jul-2023 by Beatrice
Babis Makridis movies
MISERERE
2018
