User Reviews

One of this movies you watch and getting excited about but then disappoints you after all.

Actually i couldn't find the story. Neither her relation to her husband, nor her relation the her sister or parents. I get that she is struggling with life. But the why isn't really told at all. For a movie which is totally about its main character, you get pretty much no insight in her character. All things she does are making some sense. but for me it is the task of the movie to explain it to me. to let me understand the character and her feelings. And this is done poorly.

Actually the movie kinda got me when she was planing everything. giving her children away, the strange black car at the start[..]. So at least, i thought, she had a plan. And especially the movie made it look like she had a plan. But in the end: No, no plan. Shes not running away traveling the world or is becoming a sex slave (wich i thought at some point). She just drives to nowhere chased by a police car appearing like in a classical action movie (totally stupid and with no reason). If this is a metaphor for her getting nowhere in life, If this should be the whole point of this movie, showing that she cant run away and cant get nowhere, i will instantly take 3 stars off my rating and never watch movies again.

Also 50% of the screen time you see her having sex with her husband. Yeah OK i get that she had great sex and a lot. but really it felt like the whole point in this movie was showing them "making love". Anyway, i like the style and display of sexuality in this movie. Its just too much and always the same shot and after the 3 or 4th time nobody can tell me that it has any value to the plot anymore.

6 points because her performance is great and for nice shots and colours. But i wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

As may be apparent from my moniker, I have a particular interest in all things Greek. This film, which I saw at the 2015 International Film Festival Rotterdam, deals with current political and economic difficulties that this nation faces, but its focus is on the domestic (in both senses)causes of those troubles.

Angeliki Papoulia, the bright star at the heart of this film, plays Maria, a woman who has not seen anything go her way. Her husband, a sailor, is not there enough for her, and her sister, her one-time perfect companion, is now married to a reprehensible lump of a human. What's more, the family business, which her invalid mother has handled (poorly) without help from her husband, is on the verge of ruin. The family is in debt, Maria is at her end of her tether, and nothing in her personal life gives her satisfaction anymore.

This film, like others that have been placed under the general heading of films from the Greek Weird Wave, needs thought and attention. Its narrative breaks up linear time, and its characters are often found committing strange acts, but there are, I think, valid reasons behind all the choices that the director has made. The use of flashback in a film that is examining how Maria's past (and her family's past actions) has thoroughly destroyed her present, is a reminder that we cannot always simply forget and move on. As to those moments where some viewers might ask why - her husband's sexual actions at sea, her father's failure to act until he is forced by his daughter into undertaking a final mad measure, or Maria's own orchestration of her father's desperate crime - I would put their behaviour down to a shared tendency to live in the now, regardless of consequences, a tendency that, at the national level, sits as the foundation-stone of the crisis depicted in this film.

I cannot close without heaping praise on Angeliki Papoulia's performance. Once again, she has offered the viewer a fully fleshed, complicated and absorbingly real character that also manages to operate as an archetype.

Saw this at the Rotterdam film festival 2015 (IFFR). Very well acted and shot overall, but the fragmentation and the continuous back- and forward-flashes deteriorate this movie. There were some compensations, however, for example Maria's impressive monologue in the support group, where she declared her life "ridiculous" in spite of all the things in her favor (healthy children, loving husband, etc). Her monologue explains what this movie is all about. For that reason it would have been much better when this scene had been moved to very early.

Also, the opening scene where someone drives through the dark woods while a radio reporter talks about woods deliberately set on fire, did not provide for any clues how it connected to the story at hand, and neither did subsequent scenes enlighten us in any way. Worse, we had to wait until the end for an explanation how this related to everything else. We get a few pieces of information that Maria is involved in an evil plan, being promised large sums of money before and after the "action", yet it all dangles in the air without becoming clear until the very end. This is far too late to make an enjoyable story which involves us in the protagonists and their motives.

Finally, also caused by a badly sequenced screenplay, is my opinion that the family relations that are the underlying cause of all the troubles, are not introduced properly, or their introductions are too late and too little. We can only reconstruct the true drama in hindsight, but I don't feel any inclination to see this movie twice. Maybe I'm old-fashioned and relying too much on a logical narrative. It's a pity, as all elements were present, but the order could be much better to include the viewer in the process.