Reconstitution

At first sight the film looks OK; everything is neat and the half-documentary style suits well Angelopoulos and appears to serve its purpose... I don't feel very comfortable with formalists though, honestly I don't trust them very much. For me formalism is a way of lying. When you don't have much to say, you resort to formalism - that is my idea for films and for life itself. Or, you deliberately aim to cover your tracks - but what would Angelopoulos want to hide in this particular film? Well, he seems to have a good deal of contempt for erotic passion, just to mention one.

While far from my favorite film by the great Greek film-maker Theo Angelopoulos, it is exquisitely shot in gorgeous, stark black and white, and very impressive as a first feature.

I also find (as with other of his films) I get more out of it on each viewing. This exploration of the nature of truth revolving around the murder of a husband by his wife and her lover in a tiny Greek hamlet, and the subsequent investigation by the police and the press is emotionally reserved to the point of disconnection at times. And the time-shifting style – which I often love – on first viewing left me confused and frustrated more than enlightened. But once I was prepared for its fragmented approach, I found its sometime confusing density powerful.

I also realized how fully this is more than just a noir murder tale. It's a tale of the death of a way of life as well, as the rural towns of Greece were abandoned for money and hope in the big cities and abroad.

The plot of Theo Angelopoulos' Reconstruction resembles The Postman Always Rings Twice. A woman and her lover murder her husband and try to plant a plausible story. A police investigation casts suspicion on the couple's story. This time the wife is not Lana Turner, Jessica Lange, or even Clara Calamai. No, the adulterous wife looks like what her character is supposed to be: An illiterate, thirty-five year-old peasant woman, a mother of three. Then, again, her lover is no John Garfield. Reconstruction strips all of the glamor from its noir plot leaving a stark, realist portrayal of stagnation and desperation (as opposed to passion). Its visual look is stark and uninviting. Gone are even the seascapes which Angelopolous captures so well in other movies.

Reconstruction is set in a poor, rural village on a hillside. This is a landscape of stone, dirt, and dark clouds. A narrated prologue informs the viewer that this village's population has dropped from a couple thousand inhabitants to less than one-hundred in twenty years. The young, and even the not so young, are leaving, to Athens, to Germany, anywhere there is a forty hour week and nightclubs and good times. In the beginning of the film, Eleni's husband returns from working overseas. He has been gone for years and Eleni has found a secret lover to replace him. Soon, the husband is dead.

The film alternates between scenes of the police reconstructing the murder, trying to discover which lover was most responsible for the crime, and flashbacks of the lovers trying to cover their tracks. Two journalists show up to interview the citizens of the village (and don't add much to the film). That is about all there is to Reconstruction.

I normally admire director Angelopoulos' films. Many do not, finding them interminably boring. I, however, like the director's visual eye and appreciate the way he plays with time. I did not care much for Reconstruction. The film's pace was slow, even if it is the director's shortest film. The flashback structure did not have the sophistication of, say, Ulysses' Gaze, where years of Christmas celebrations go by in a single shot. Finally, I found the cinematography drab with the exception of two great scenes (a zoom out of Eleni burning evidence on a hilltop; a 360 degree pan around shamed, angry villagers as Eleni and her lover are being loaded onto a police truck).

Reconstruction feels much longer than it really is. It can probably be skipped by non-fans.

This film portrays multiple reconstructions of a domestic crime in a poverty stricken and dying part of rural post war Greece. For the director, portraying the rock strewn environment of a community in decline is a key message, giving us beautiful if somewhat depressing and repetitive images. This is a setting for the crime and subsequent investigation, which is of limited interest. This true story is not an unusual one in life or films/ literature and the multiple reconstructions, very slow pace and banal setting further rob it of dramatic tension. The reconstructions specifically lead to repetition and perhaps some confusion. Characterisation and scenes are well handled, though again tending to follow expected patterns, perhaps precisely because it is based on court transcripts. Overall, critically acclaimed and visually stunning, but you may find it seems rather longer than it actually is.

Theodoros Angelopoulos' first feature-length film could perhaps be desrcibed, in broad terms, as the Greek "Rashomon". It's ocassionally visually impressive, especially in the sections shot in a mountain village so deserted that it almost looks like a post-apocalyptic landscape, though at other times the images are dark and murky. The pace is inert, the dialogue is spare and stilted, and the storytelling is disjointed; the juggling of the choronological sequence of events seems more confusing than illuminating. In any case, if you want to see an arthouse black-and-white Greek policier, this is probably one of your very few options. ** out of 4.