Compassion: (from the Latin cum patior - I suffer with - and from the Greek συμπἀθεια , sym patheia - "sympathy" feeling emotions with..) is a feeling whereby an individual emotionally perceives the suffering of others wishing to alleviate it.

Sympathetic and succorful attitude toward a distressing state: human thing is having compassion.

The concept of compassion recalls that of empathy from the Greek "εμπαθεια" (empateia, composed of en-, "within," and pathos, "affection or feeling"), which was used to denote the emotional relationship of subjective participation that bound the spectator in ancient Greek theater to the acting actor and also the identification he or she had with the character he or she was playing.

Semi-dark room a man sobs in despair as the caption tries to explain the concept of compassion.

We are in Greece, luxury apartment, the man, the one sobbing, a teenager, his son, a dog.

The wife is in the hospital in a coma.

The neighbor brings an orange cake, the secretary hugs him, the gentleman at the dry cleaners asks how his wife is doing and gives him special treatment, the friend covers him with gratification as they play at the beach,, the dog tries to console him, two pillows on which to lie at night trying to fill the gap.

The man works, he is a lawyer and takes care of clients as if they were family.

He keeps sobbing on his bed as he describes the path of tears: from his stomach to his lungs, from his esophagus to his carotid artery to his eyes.

He goes to the hospital every day and kisses his comatose wife on the mouth. The son is an excellent student excellent pianist but according to him he does not have big enough hands and should not play cheerful pieces; the neighbors might think they are not sad enough about his mother's fate.

The captions describe the attitude of people who stop feeling compassion because something more tragic distracts them...

The man composes a farewell song for his wife who unexpectedly comes out of her coma and returns home, and while he works to provide her with post-trauma rehabilitative physical therapy, he invites her for a follow-up mammogram.

She will continue to demand dessert from the neighbor, tell lies to the shopkeeper, and exercise her apparent control freakiness in search of compassion.

She interrogates people about their pains, tampering with her son's piano, going for a boat ride with her dog; she goes to her father to move him to pity.

Thus begins the path of the absurd, buys a yellow bicycle, loads it into the Lexus, and thus embarks on the violent parable of pain at all costs...including the use of tear gas.

As Greek tragedy sings of the unhappiness of human fate so Herodotus in his Histories recounts Xerxes' despair in the face of his ships, and the sobbing man decides to replace the picture of the tranquil seascape with the ship swept away by a storm.

From here only violence and pity will be the ultimate end on which to sacrifice one's unbearable eventual happiness.

Only pity and extreme compassion turned into absolute sorrow will be fulfilling.

Extreme tragic and inglorious unhappiness is the only illusory guarantee of mercy, and our man finds the goal inescapable.

How real is the surreality told in this existential journey turns out to be irresistible. as the tragi-comic and grotesque setting; through the icy, lacerating inexpressiveness and framing typical of the Greek nouvelle vague.

A double gaze Makridis' has on a humanity that, destined for unhappiness, compulsively projects the obsessive search for it.

Compassion as search/thesis, pity as evidence/antithesis, punishment as evidence/outcome/synthesis.

Illusory refuge of despair, arousing pity as the result of a pity that is no longer compassionate or even merciful .

The film depicts the existential emptiness that intuits in pain, unhappiness and pity the last lifeline of human misery.

The partial path of liberation from pain identified by Schopenhauer in compassion is the path, however phenomenal, taken by this man so infected by life that he fails to detect its inevitable warped outrageous condition.

Can the inability to feel emotional pain induce the need to at least provoke pity?

Can punishment, pity and compassion trigger an irreversible addictive relationship?

Which pusher to turn to: evil, pain, illness, death?

A glossy icy surface to point the finger at the tragic funereal inhuman depths; a deafening, blinding, chilling film, an existential noir, a cruel play, a sophisticated portrait, a refined and brutal observation.

Music invades the scenes and the requiem in D minor K 626 moves...

Yet invoking mercy is like kneeling to the Father to ask:

thy cruelty be done

give us this day our daily sorrow

deliver us from love

AMEN

27-Jun-2023 by Beatrice