Greek comedy

Taking it all in at Thessaloniki

After Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf's wife died of cancer, he married her sister, Marzieh Meshkini; and soon Meshkini was doing the same as every other member of Makhmalbaf's household: making movies. She learned her craft in the informal film school that's set up in their Tehran home, and she apprenticed as an assistant director on projects by her husband and her precocious niece, Samira Makhmalbaf (The Apple, Blackboard). Then she struck out on her own, directing the acclaimed three-story feature The Day I Became a Woman, which has a sneak-preview screening at the Museum of Fine Arts this Friday (December 1).

"My film hasn't yet shown in Iran, so I can't talk of the reaction of the community," Meshkini said at last week's Thessaloniki Film Festival, on the Aegean coast of Greece, where The Day I Became a Woman was screened in competition. But she was hopeful that Iranians would respond favorably to what can be read only as a no-holds-barred critique of female oppression in her country.

"What you see in the film is a mild form of the actual reality. In Iran today, when you walk in the streets, you feel like you're in Saudi Arabia. But at home, you could be in Europe." One of the revelatory scenes in the film is a visit to an underground Tehran shopping center with its stylish, up-to-date fashion. "That's what you wear at home," said Meshkini.

And home-based film school? "We made a family class with 15 students, theory and practice. We studied the history of cinema, editing, montage, but we had other classes for sports like swimming and bicycling. My film was the focus of the lessons."

The bicycling became the centerpiece of one of the stories of The Day I Became a Woman, a competitive race along the seaside where Iranian women all pedaled in their dark chadors. One woman is chased on horseback by her traditional husband and brothers, who are offended by her dash to female freedom. The male relatives surround her and take away her bicycle.

"I don't show that this particular woman goes back to her former life," Meshkini said emphatically. "Maybe she lost her bicycle, but she doesn't go back."

The Thessaloniki Festival, in its 41st year, is the best-curated in the Balkans, and a place for the latest important European releases. France's François Ozon seems to have a new work every six months; here he was represented by Under the Sand, a typically (for this filmmaker) creepy feature about a middle-aged woman (the eternally fetching Charlotte Rampling) whose husband disappears at the beach one day. She returns to her Paris life as a professor, and, repressing his absence, imagines he still resides in her apartment and bed. Shades of Polanski.

Sweden's Lukas Moodysson, whom even Ingmar Bergman praised for his wonderful lesbian comedy Fucking Åmål (barely seen in the USA after it was retitled Show Me Love), has a splendid, crowd-tickling second film, Together. It's also a comedy about the screwy doings -- including hurtful experiments in "free love" -- in a 1970s hippie commune. So far, no American distributor.

The worst thing at Thessaloniki, as always, was the embarrassing unveiling of all the new Greek films. "Promise me you won't see any Greek movies here," a Thessaloniki director pleaded with me, knowing that there is probably no more lost national cinema on earth: bad film after bad film, pseudo-poetic and pseudo-profound overacted melodramas that are hated by the local citizenry.

In reaction to all that moribund seriousness, Greek audiences have flocked to a lowbrow domestic comedy called Safe Sex that starred their favorite TV personalities. That movie, as I was told time and again, has made more money in Greece than Titanic. I did try to watch it at Thessaloniki but made it through only a shoddy half-hour of show-your-tits and masturbation jokes.

There's just one Greek filmmaker who's revered in world cinema, and that's Theo Angelopoulos (Ulysses' Gaze, Landscape in the Midst), who was given a fine Thessaloniki retrospective. Serious-minded Greek critics write worshipfully of his highbrow oeuvre. Greek filmmakers are frustrated by the degree to which he's hogged the spotlight. Most Greek people who have seen his movies are mystified and find them painfully tedious.

Angelopoulos's demeanor is part of the problem. He is unashamedly full of himself, a self-proclaimed genius.

My festival driver from the airport, a young engineer, had earlier been Angelopoulos's driver. "He is a simple man in a way," he observed of his minutes with the filmmaker. "He had just a small bag, like a student." But my driver added a contradictory note: "Angelopoulos's wife arrived on a separate plane, one daughter on another, two daughters on another." Like a royal family.

And what did Angelopoulos say as they rode? "I like clouds and rain." "But what about the sun?" "It's nothing."

What my driver didn't bring up in their conversation was the great Greek's movies. "I saw only one and it was so boring. There was one shot of a door for 15 minutes. Why?"

Then my driver smiled, recalling a genuinely entertaining time at the cinema. "I recommend that you see Safe Sex. It's a great Greek film, more popular than Titanic."

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