The heavy burden of grief that some people carry around with them for years after a loved one dies finds a new metaphor in Arcadia, an offbeat Greek ghost story directed by Yorgos Zois (Interruption, 2015).
This original take on a depressing topic is lightened up, if you can call it that, by some surprises, notably gratuitous sex scenes that come out of left field when you least expect it and have no logical relationship with the story. The film’s bow in Berlin’s Encounters sidebar should test the waters with festival audiences before hitting specialty theatrical venues.
This is a ghost story with a difference: the protagonists are the spirits of the dead, who awaken post-mortem to find themselves unwillingly chained to their living consort or relative and gloomily dragged around as painful baggage from the past. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the spirits are a metaphor for the lingering grief that embeds itself in the psyche; the pain of mourning that won’t go away. Ultimately the film spells out the way to mental health for the living and dead alike: namely, to accept their loss and move on.
Of course, this is easier said than done. The film begins as a classic art house noir, one with a very slow set-up. A man with long uncombed hair and wild eyes is driving furiously through a desolate landscape. Yannis (Vangelis Mourikis), a defrocked doctor, has been called to a morgue in a seaside town to identify the body of a woman who drove off a cliff. Yes, it is his wife Katerina and embarrassingly, she was in the company of a man who also died. Distraught and high on amphetamines, Yannis moodily decides to sleep in the love nest that the adulterous couple was renting. The young local cop and the woman who owns the house leave him alone with his grief.
But there is another person at Yannis’s side: a well-dressed, puzzled-looking woman in high heels. It takes several scenes to figure out who she is and why everybody is ignoring her presence. This is Katerina’s spirit (Angeliki Papoulia), who cannot be seen or heard by the living, only by other spirits like herself. And as it turns out, the town is filled with the latter and they do not act anything like your typical poltergeists.
The film shifts viewpoints to Katerina and her bewilderment at finding herself wearing uncomfortable shoes she can’t take off, tagging along after her husband. She can remember nothing about the accident in which she was killed. Enlightenment comes late that night from the horny teenage son of the woman who owns the house – he, too, is a ghost who died young from a bad heart. To teach Katerina the ropes, he takes her to a shack on the edge of town where, surprisingly, everyone is morosely sitting around stark naked. There are men and women of all ages, with ordinary bodies out of Bosch or Seidl and the vacant stares of run-down automata. The rules are gently explained to Katerina: in order to remember the past, she too has to strip and have sex with someone – which she does with a nice female ghost who approaches her. In a ghost story, it’s hard to say this frankly shot, ridiculously motivated and not particularly funny scene stretches credulity, but it certainly leaves the audience in a vacuum, grasping for meaning.
At least Katerina seems to catch on, and the slower viewers will, too when a shadow explains, “They drag us around because they have unfinished business with us. They’re the ones haunting us.” The final scenes do lighten up the glumfest a bit, even for Yannis, whose dark past is laid out neatly in a scene he plays with the bereaved wife of Katerina’s lover. Naturally the widow’s ghost of a husband is listening in not far away.
While it’s hard to sympathize much with any of these flawed characters, the one ghost who seems worth saving is the one following the young policeman around: a lost German shepherd the officer describes as his best friend. The resolution of their relationship is satisfying in ways the complicated humans are not.
Papoulia (Dogtooth) and Mourikis, who was in Berlin in 2020 with the film Digger, are strong presences as the tormented main couple, though the chemistry between them is so non-existent it suggests a reason why they parted ways. The cinematography is soft-focused and drained, creating the feeling of an unnatural limbo that is reinforced by the stately editing and an abstract soundtrack.
Director: Yorgos Zois
Screenwriters: Konstantina Kotzamani, Yorgos Zois
Producers: Antigoni Rota, Maria Drandaki, Stelios Cotionis
Cast: Vangelis Mourikis, Angeliki Papoulia, Elena Topalidou, Nikolas Papagiannis, Vangelis Evangelinos
Cinematography: Konstantinos Koukoulios
Production design: Elena Vardava
Costume design: Vassilia Rozanaà
Editing: Yannis Chalkiadakis
Music: Petar Dundakov
Sound design: Leandros Ntounis
Sound: Alexander Simeonov
Production companies: Foss Productions (Greece), Homemade Films (Greece) in coproduction with Red Carpet (Bulgaria) in association with Two & Two Pictures (UK)
World sales: Beta Cinema
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Encounters)
In Greek
99 minutes
