Winona

I really wanted to watch this one. The Boy (the director, acotr and the man behind the soundtrack is Alexandros Voulgaris, who is also a Greek singer called "The Boy". I learned about his songs the summer that past and I started taking a good look at his recent work and although it is totally weird and alienating, it was so fascinating and captivating, underneath the quircky lyrics and complex melody, there lied an honest person with a vision and a heart. That was what I got from his recent film, Winona, a story about 4 girls that spend their day in the beach doing what 4 girls usually do-tlak, play, sing , enjoy, swim, laugh and do dump things. I love this film. It just...it's such a lovely and easy-going film to seat through and it is a unique emotional journey.

Firslty, the visual storytelling. The movie was shot with a kodak 16mm film using film and it looks gorgeous. This movie manages to master the art of portraying a certain time at a certain season with certain people. This film IS summer anc I have not seen any other film portraying the colours and the melancholy of summer so vividly before ( ok , maybe Call me by your name). The sun, the sand, the sea, the clouds , the flowers, its texture is so soft and beatiful.

The dialogue is pretty lose from start to finish, but that's not bad at all. It's point is to portray a summer day and the relationships of the characters. It feels really playful and fun evne if there is no actual order of events or a clear view of the story, but that offers for a more relaxing movie experience. The dialogue blends fantasy with reality and it's vastly humorous and funny. It is an astonisihngly new way of blending hypothetical fantasieswhile telling a story. But, under the fantasy-based dialogue lies a sadness and this applies to the film in general. It is fun and has the summer shine, but it is also a melancholic pitcure and a haunting memoir of conversations, laughs, sadness,wonder and loss.

I wathced this film at Thessaloniki International Film Festival and the director and the cast were there to share their experience and answer to our questions. He said that the film has plenty of music because he really loves musical adn he lasways wanted to make one and although this movie is not a musical, musc is always present and adds a certain feeling to every scene. The songs are great and the score is magical. Also, the director is actually a really humble and cool guy. I asked for an autograph and he was so humble that he did not want to sign and I had plenty of conversaitons with him and he is really authentic and true and interesting. I look forward to experiencing more of his films- I actually watched Pink and it was really good and personal- and to his music and I believe htat Greek films should become more known to the public because there a lot of inspiring voices out there that need to be heard and The Boy is no exception. What a perfect day!

Winona is shiny, gorgeous, crispy, melancholic, salty and sad See it with sun-glasses and while making castles on the sand

Fought to stay awake through it.

Seemed like mediocre writers generated large volumes of inane, vapid dialogue hoping that some it would be good enough for the final script and all of it got used, even though almost none of it was any good.

The story is known. From sunrise to sunset of a late summer day, four young women kill their time in a deserted beach. They are saying corny (let God make them) jokes, sing discordant songs, recite reams of non-sense together, talk a lot about Woody Allen, managing to say absolutely nothing (which is a feat by itself). They tear up and laugh by themselves, they put up sunscreen, dive into the sea from time to time and create pointless fictions about the only house overlooking the beach. I believe i am getting understood.

But wait a minute! There is suspense also. A car is there and they are probably being watched, but may be not. Probably there is something else going on also, and if this can't be deciphered from the movie, then there are those courteous cinema "critics" who point it out in their "critiques", so that the viewers will expect it and not leave in the middle of the movie. Of course, at the end of the film, even this "something else" is unclear whether it is happening or not. The emotions that the director probably aimed to are lost and sunk in the general boredom that he has successfully generated thus far. The viewer can't take seriously this new discovery, when the director is not taking it seriously himself. There are some Latin American movies that use the technique of the last minute revelation very skillfully and the director should probably want to go and look them over.

However, this movie has a real achievement at its disposal: 14 hours of cinema time are condensed into 2 hours of real time, but the viewer is sure that it is rather 24 hours that have passed by. Since it seems that the director/script writer likes cinema jokes, he should have called his movie "The Big Sleep" instead of "Winona".

This is a typical example of bad Greek cinema that is promoted by certain critics. It reminded me of "Blackout" (1998), that had also been promoted at its time by certain critics. However, "Blackout" had been, even unintentionally, amusing in its pompousness. "Winona" is unable to even offer this shallow compensation for the the two hours waste.

Is this really what Greek TV has come to? Honestly, it needs to do better! It seems like everyone these days is trying to create a screenplay that captures some profound life lesson, but most are falling short-failing miserably, in fact! 4 women singing in bad tone for the whole time, then screaming and running around saying nonsense for the whole movie. Can someone please in Greece actually make a good movie with English subtitles so we can share Greek culture with the rest of the world and actually make a good meaningful movie? This is not it by far! The dialogue is abysmal! The characters shallow and one sided with no depth. This seems that this is the best that Greek cinema has to offer for international viewers ? How sad that we are sharing this with the rest of the world?!

The movie as a whole is not bad, the director though tried his best to do something a little bit unusual, a little bit confusing, i dont know exactly how to describe it without spoiling the movie but i got the feeling that it was tiring. The idea behind the movie is very good, especially in a emotional and psychological dimension. The problem for me is that the director overdid it with some lines and some scenes which were totally unnecessary, didnt help the plot they were used just to be used. A typical example of Art only for Art. Also this confusion between weird lines and weird scenes makes it hard for normal person to understand the movie, which is a pity because the movie as is said is good, but in a way it selfdestructs!