Updating the classic ancient Greek revenge tragedy Electra to a World War II setting, Cavewoman is the first full feature in a decade from Greek-Colombian auteur Spiros Stathoulopoulos, and by some distance his most formally experimental work to date. Mostly composed of 24 extended close-up shots of a single actor, Greek “Weird Wave” regular Angeliki Papoulia (Dogtooth, Alps, The Lobster), with heavy reliance on sound design as a stand-in for visual storytelling, this stylistically bold work is unashamedly a rarefied art-house item. The heavily mannered approach jars at times, but there are satisfying rewards here for patient viewers and fans of avant-garde theatre, which this production resembles as much as a cinematic drama. World premiering at Thessaloniki International Film Festival this week, this audacious remix of Euripides will likely be limited by its uncompromising style to festival outings and cult movie circles, but with extra potential appeal to literary historians and drama scholars.
Festival veteran Stathoulopoulos previously earned positive reviews in Cannes with his single-shot real-time terrorism thriller PVC-1 (2009) before competing in Berlin with Metéora (2012), a racy tale of forbidden love between a monk and a nun which landed him in a costly legal battle with the Greek Orthodox Church. Indeed, the director says part of his motivation for making Cavewoman was to illustrate how religious fundamentalists use God to justify committing evil deeds. The layers of vengeful intent are pretty meta here. This time it’s personal.
The unnamed “cavewoman” of the film’s title is a fierce Greek resistance fighter (Papoulia) hiding out in a mountain cave on the Nazi-occupied island of Crete in 1941. Traumatised since childhood after witnessing the cold-blooded murder of her beloved father by her treacherous mother and her mother’s secret lover, this contemporary descendant of Electra has been planning matricidal revenge for years. The return of her brother (Trainspotting veteran Ewen Bremner, heard but never seen on screen) to Crete after decades in Scottish exile finally provides the extra means and muscle to embark on this bloody mission, first by kidnapping and killing her mother’s Nazi-collaborating lover, and then by tricking her way into a lethal reunion with her long-estranged mother herself in Cairo.
The rigorous formal conceit of Cavewoman soon becomes clear as Stathoulopoulos keeps his camera firmly fixed on Papoulia’s intense, glowering face for almost the entire film, with just the occasional swerve to sketch in impressionistic flashes of background detail. Mostly we see the star in intimate close-up, her flinty features consumed by pitiless cold fury, plus more sporadically in wider mid-shot framing with secondary characters as silhouettes or marginal presences at the edge of the screen, but never taking focus from the anti-heroine. The rest of the small cast perform off-screen in voice-over roles, although some are briefly glimpsed in still-life poses during interstitial scene-change divides, standing naked and inert alongside gloriously pretentious chapter headings like “The blooming of her savagery” and “The decapitation of a carnivorous plant”.
To complicate matters further, Stathoulopoulos employs separate performers for different aspects of each supporting character: one for voice, another for on-screen silhouettes, and a third for their physical manifestation during these transitional scenes. He also bookends the main action with prologue and epilogue flashbacks that set up the roots of this family tragedy, a pastoral horror story of brutal betrayal set to incongruously joyous bursts of Vivaldi and Paganini. These scenes play like self-conscious homages to the chilly formalism of veteran British art-house director Peter Greenaway.
Judged as straight cinematic entertainment, Cavewoman is a forbidding watch in places, with limited scope for visual drama and stilted poetic dialogue that will inevitably test the patience of some viewers. But as a technical exercise, it is unquestionably impressive, not least as a masterclass in the use of sound design and Foley effects to create gripping audio pictures. The rich acoustic backdrop here works hard to encapsulate some momentous off-screen events, from bombing raids to shipwrecks to roadside ambushes. Even the strikingly visceral crunch and splat of a graphic battlefield bayonet attack, not to mention a gory axe murder and dismemberment scene, are conjured up purely with sound effects and facial reactions.
At his Thessaloniki premiere, Stathoulopoulos talked up Cavewoman as a “creative collaboration” between film-maker and audience, with the viewer’s imagination completing these meticulously detailed sonic landscapes by filling in the necessary visual component. Which is an audacious claim, but the technique proves surprisingly effective. Though the theatrical mannerisms are initially alienating, by the end it feels like we have experienced these events on some broader sensory level. This is due in no small part to a bravura star performance by Papoulia , whose close-up expressions invoke an operatic emotional range using minimal means. A flawed experiment at times, but a mostly worthwhile one.
Director, screenwriter: Spiros Stathoulopoulos
Cast: Angeliki Papoulia, Ewen Bremner
Cinematography: Andrés Morales, Spiros Stathoulopoulos
Editing: Andrés Gómez D., Spiros Stathoulopoulos
Sound: Diego Rodríguez
Producers: Spiros Stathoulopoulos, David Corredor, Andrés Gómez D.
Production companies: Candelaria Films (Colombia), 1821 Pictures (US), 1821 Studios (Canada)
World sales: Candelaria Films
Venue: Thessaloniki International Film Festival (Crossing Borders)
In Greek, English
94 minutes
