A Day in the Life of Jo: Chapter Phaedra

Portents, symbols of the unconscious and music as a portal to unexplored depths and dimensions have always lent a mesmeric layer of playful, cosmic dreaminess to the coming-of-age films of Greek director Jacqueline Lentzou, and in A Day in the Life of Jo: Chapter Phaedra, her sophomore feature after 2021’s Moon, 61 Questions and a string of acclaimed shorts, she is able once again to bring startling, fresh moments of poetry and a surprising emotional frankness to her favoured cinematic terrain.

Screening at the International Film Festival Mannheim-Heidelberg in Germany after its premiere in the Orizzonti section at Venice, A Day in the Life of Jo is buoyed by Lentzou’s talent for capturing the volatile and obsessive inner earthquakes of adolescence as teens struggle for new connections beyond strained family configurations. She hits a sweet spot between poetry and self-irony, as she embraces creativity’s freedom to transcend reality beyond the borders of death and our own planet. Decidedly unconventional plotting and flashes of formal experimentation place this firmly within the more niche arthouse spectrum of audience appeal, where it has charm in spades.

The titular Jo (an intense and disarming Evita Andriopoulou) is a sensitive fifteen-year-old curious for new perceptions who has had it with the unreliable support of her not so amicably divorced parents, kicking the car tail-light in when she misses the bus and her moody art teacher mother (Eleni Vergeti) won’t drive her to school. But someone else soon preoccupies her inner world, when she hears Phaedra (Anastasia Gouliamou) sing in front of the class. Phaedra is a unicorn-like presence in the school, her prim, bookish fashion, long hair and unawareness of pop culture seemingly out of time, and far away from Jo’s septum piercing and hip, generationally driven tastes. Phaedra has an ethereal, classical voice that makes Jo cry, and frantically search out the old torch song, Rose Tattoo, on Spotify, as a new favourite.

Giddy with this new crush, Jo courts the friendship of Pheadra, who initiates her into the transporting bliss of recess in the school music room, and a whole new realm of musical taste. Jo’s awkward, unintentionally amusing efforts to relate through conversational revelations about her family provide some of the film’s most endearing moments, before the film takes a bold and surprising plot turn into a more radically surreal and metafictional, disembodied direction.

The soundtrack is an integral, inspired driver of atmosphere, as in all Lentzou’s films. It’s not the first time Roxy Music has been played in them, and here Jo’s mother, driving her car through the city, sings along to the band’s 1980 track Flesh and Blood, before berating students in a dance session that they are not giving the routine enough of themselves.

Lentzou, through the gorgeous work of D.O.P. Grimm Vandekerckhove, taps into Jo’s emotionally hungry and searching mind. The camera roves close over scenes, which brim with the beauty of everyday details and their potency to generate pure poetry and snatches of sublime captivation. Objects and images appear sometimes, and we melt into an overwhelming expanse of sea, as entities in voice-over discuss what symbols to send from dreams. Because this is not just any day, it will emerge, but one in which a freak event involving amped-up law enforcement and the bullet of a gun in crowds on the street will upend her existence and transform her consciousness forever. The context (it was inspired by the 2008 killing of a student protester by police in Athens) is kept oblique in the film. But the placing of Jo’s awakening stirrings within a dramatically unpredictable environment of European unrest and violence feels unforced and urgently apt, even as Lentzou keeps the tone philosophical and quirky, never politically heavy.

Director, writer: Jacqueline Lentzou
Editors: Jacqueline Lentzou, Gabriel Gonzalez, Nikos Vavouris
Cinematographer: Grimm Vandekerckhove
Producers: Annabelle Aronis, Ioanna Bolomyti, Arda Ciltepe, Steffen Goldkamp, Andrea Queralt, Elli Papadiamanti, Jacqueline Lentzou
Cast: Evita Andriopoulou, Eleni Vergeti, Anastasia Gouliamou
Music: Colin Stetson
Sound: Dimitris Kanellopoulos
Production companies: Avion Films (Annabelle Aronis), Atalante Productions (Ioanna Bolomyti), Kelek Film (Arda Çiltepe, Steffen Goldkamp), 4A4 Productions (Andrea Queralt), Haris & Co (Elli Papadiamanti), Jacqueline Lentzou
Sales: Lucky Number
Venue: Mannheim-Heidelberg
In Greek
88 minutes