El paso suspendido de la cigüeña

Theo Angelopoulos's look at refugees in Greece looks timely nowadays, with large numbers of them fleeing to Europe, often entering through Greece. "To meteoro vima tou pelargou" ("The Suspended Step of the Stork" in English) focuses on a reporter who, while covering the refugees, comes across a politician who disappeared some years earlier.

This movie will definitely not be for everyone. There are only two recognizable names in it - Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau - and there are segments with little to no dialogue. What we do get is a work that reminds us of the problem of borders. These artificial constructs are simply ways of keeping out those seeking a better life, whether from Europe or from the United States.

I don't know if I would call it a masterpiece, but the direction and cinematography (as well as the moral questions that it raises) certainly make it a movie worth seeing. Check it out if you can find it.

This is the first part of Border Trilogy. This film shows how these barriers and borders divide people, how loved ones are separated, in deep analysis.

Theo Angelopoulos is one of the best director with a different vision, emphasizing the visual philosophy, and aesthetic aspects of film making. His unique visuals in mist and grey tone is prominent in this film as well. This is a very slow moving, intellectual, political and philosophical movie, so not everyone can enjoy it the same way. But, his films are a must watch for academic purposes.

Having only ever seen one Angelopoulos film before - The Travelling Players, which thrilled me about as much as paint drying on a wall - I was unprepared for the revelation that is The Suspended Step of the Stork. Shot over a decade ago, this long metaphysical tale of desperate refugees and disenchanted politicians has become more contemporary with each intervening year. As if a lone Greek film-maker had somehow prophesied the horrors of Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq - and the creeping paralysis that has overtaken Western democracy.

It begins in a refugee camp on the Greek-Albanian border, where a TV journalist spots an elderly man (Marcello Mastroianni) and decides he is a leading politician who went missing years before. Tracing the man's 'widow' (Jeanne Moreau) the reporter gropes his way towards the film's central dilemma. What could make a progressive intellectual lose all faith in humanity, to the extent that he gives up not only his political career but also his very identity?

This sounds like dry stuff indeed, and so it might be without the alchemical power of Angelopoulous's camera. There are sequences here that beg for inclusion in an anthology of all-time cinema greats. The tracking-shot along a disused train, each carriage inhabited by a penniless refugee family. The wedding across the river, with bride and groom stranded on opposite sides by the arbitrary idiocy of national borders, which veers perilously close to kitsch but never succumbs.

Moreau is magnificent, Mastroianni his genial hangdog self, but neither actor could ever mistake this film for a star vehicle. If there is a star here, it's the soul of humanity itself. A soul neither living nor dead, but held in suspended animation.

This was my first, and probably the last Angelopoulos movie. I was eager to get into it, as it featured Mastroianni, one of my favorite actors and was a film By Theo, of whom I've heard a lot. The opening was promising, a long shot over a jeep of soldiers across the Albanian-Greek border. OK! but that was all. Nothing left. The movie had big holes and I don't know which to mention first. The main plot of the story is revealed to the journalist by the old woman. during a long walk. It's like a 15 minutes monologue, killing the action and viewers patience, nothing happening on screen for 15 or even 20 minutes, apart this old lady telling a story. All that is presumed to be shown through action, was simply told to the camera by the old lady. In a moment, the equippe of TV was heading to the bar. They turn the corner and immediately the winter begins! Probably, shot in different days, continuity leaked. A lot of problems with the story-telling, it went from absurd to irrational never sticking to a style, making the viewer asking questions that never got answers. Poor Mastroianni, given a role which lacked integrity or charm. On the other hand, as many Greeks or Albanians or Balcan people would agree with, the movies showed lot of historic, ethnic, or politically incorrectness, just for the sake of making a movie about "humanity" as a red in another review. A lot more to say, but no time to lose on a poor movie, which was not movie at all, but lunacies of a person impressed on film and paid with state money.

On first viewing, this was not an Angelopoulos film I loved. Of course it looks great, that's a given. But the first time around, the seeming central story line seemed almost tacked on. A journalist is tracking Marcello Mastroianni, who may or may not be a famous politician and philosophic author who simply vanished one day, to a refugee zone on the edge of the Greek border, where he lives in squalor with the others there. The problem, for me, was that the Mastroianni mystery was far less powerful and interesting then the stories of those around him, who aren't refugees by choice, but in order just to survive. So, for me, it felt we were focused on the wrong plot, or certainly the more intellectual, less moving one.

Also, the dubbing of Mastroianni is pretty awful, to the point of being distracting. Oddly, that's something I didn't find in the earlier "The Beekeeper" (in fact, it was so good in that film, I thought perhaps Mastroianni spoke Greek, and was able to do his own lines).

But on second viewing I realized the film is really a chance for Angelopoulos to ask important and pointed questions about the nature of borders; national, emotional, racial, from ourselves, between men and woman. The 'main plot' is just the skeleton to hang the meat of the film on.

There are, memorable and lovely scenes here. An amazing tracking shot as the camera goes by box car after box car housing refugees from different places, deliberately and chillingly recalling the trains of German WWII, as if to ask, have we really left that past behind? The wordless slow seduction of the journalist in a restaurant is odd, and amazingly tense, as the two people simply look at each other in fairly wide shot for the longest time, the tiniest shifts in body language and facial expression telling the kind of story that is usually filled with bantered pointless dialogue. And the film's opening and closing images are particularly powerful.

Seeing it again, knowing up front the film wasn't really about the mystery it sets up, didn't solve all my problems with it, but certainly made it a much stronger experience the 2nd time around.