Familial tensions, a simmering attraction to an older man, and a strange connection to a medium all come to define a summer in the city for the teenage Eleftheria (Angeliki Beveratou).
She is sixteen and has come to Athens to visit her heavily pregnant sister. Nominally, she is there to help Alexandra (Katerina Zisoudi) in the final weeks and months before the baby is born, but at a transitional age, she also begins to take her first tentative steps into womanhood. Adapted from Giorgos Sibardis’s novel, Christina Ioakeimidi’s Medium treads some familiar pathways through the coming-of-age drama, but is enlivened by a captivating performance from Beveratou, a beguiling atmosphere, and the ambiguities of some of its more off-beat moments.
In the film’s opening moments, it feels as though its languorous pace is being dictated by that of the characters, who are suffering in the heat and happy to wallow, prone, in the shade of their apartment. In fact, the rhythms employed by Iaokeimidi’s adapted screenplay are similar to this anyway – moments are allowed to linger, characters communicate without words both to one another and the audience, and things are left to be discerned for ourselves through subtle cues rather than laborious extant explanation. It’s a tempo that amplifies the lethargy of the hot summer days but also allows for smooth shifts into Eleftheria’s burgeoning explorations of a life beyond his sister’s four walls and the drift into an intoxicating sort-of-relationship with their handsome downstairs neighbour, Angelos (Nikolakis Zeginoglou).
Despite their clear age gap, Angelos takes Eleftheria under his wing, and he drives her around the city on the back of his motorbike. Beveratou is captured in close-ups with the wind in her hair – a not unusual visual motif for this genre, but here one that feels very evocative given the stifling heat. Angelos is both a gateway into a new world of adulthood – and, potentially, sex and romance – but he is equally a release. In snatches of interactions and insinuations of exchanges the layers of tension within Eleftheria and Alexandra’s family become evident, both between the sisters but also back at home, in the village where the former lives with her father and his new family. They both clearly carry the weight of their absent mother, who was lost suddenly to cancer a few years previous and who has left them both with gaping holes that neither quite knows how to address.
This underlying pain is one of the reasons that Angelos introduces Eleftheria to his friend Anna (Martha Fritzila), the eponymous medium. And she acts as a strange beacon around which other characters seem to revolve, for Eleftheria she holds an ambiguous allure, one that presumably oscillates between being drawn to answers and afraid of them. She has a similar sense of controlled naiveté regarding Angelos who, from an early exchange would seem to potentially be gay, but with who she continues to become ever more deeply infatuated.
These contradictions and uncertainties are what make Eleftheria such a compelling character to spend time with. A girl on the cusp of womanhood is something that we are familiar with seeing portrayed in cinema, but it was supposedly her uniqueness that drew Ioakeimidi to make a film of this story in the first place. As such, it’s a challenging role for a young actress to undertake but one that Beveratou largely excels in. In much the same way that Ioakeimidi’s direction allows the film to morph between different registers with imperceptible elisions, so too does Beveratou’s performance allow her to inhabit a multifaceted character who can very naturally veer between hyper-vulnerability and assured wisdom. She can make poor decisions, or behave childishly, but equally seem to understand more than she lets on. In one sequence late in the film Eleftheria flees into the night to drink away her emotions – the less said about Beveratou’s drunk acting, the better – and comes across a group of people breakdancing in the street. As she sways towards them, the scene feels destined for a humiliating conclusion, but, in fact, she lands a few rudimentary moves and is embraced by the group. It feels like a microcosm for the way she is viewed generally, and the inner resolve and maturity required to navigate the death of her mother and her resulting familial isolation.
As with any story about a teenage summer full of roiling passions and unusual experiences, the narrative is always heading for the summer’s conclusion. It is to Ioakeimidi and Sibardis’s credit that when that time comes in Medium, it feels both incredibly poignant and fundamentally fulfilling. Whatever difficulties she has been through, or will face in the future, Eleftheria’s rite of passage has allowed her insight into worlds she didn’t know. While the film itself eschews the uneven drama of the character’s emotional rollercoaster, it retains an undeniably perceptive streak that offers precious beads of human understanding.
Director: Christina Ioakeimidi
Cast: Angeliki Beveratou, Nikos Zeginoglou, Katerina Zisoudi, Martha Fritzila
Screenplay: Christina Ioakeimidi, Giorgos Sibardis
Producers: Louizos Aslanidis, Yorgos Noussias
Production: Esko Productions (Greece), Red Carpet Films (Bulgaria)
Sales Agent: Wide Management
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (Competition Programme – Feature Film)
In Greek
100 minutes
