Death is beautiful

Theo Angelopoulos crosses the line

by Peter Keough

ETERNITY AND A DAY, Directed and written by Theo Angelopoulos. With Bruno Ganz, Achilleas Skevis, Isabelle Renauld, Eleni Gerassimidou, Alexandra Ladikou, Despina Bebedeli, and Iris Hatziantoniou. A Merchant Ivory Films release. At the Brattle Theatre, June 25 through July 1.

A fine line divides the past and present, life and death, memory and dream, in Theo Angelopoulos's Eternity and a Day. It also barely separates pretentiousness and profundity, poetry and cliché. In his latest film, a controversial Palme d'Or winner last year at Cannes and beaten out for the Foreign Language Oscar by Life Is Beautiful, the great Greek director strays from his roots in Bergman and Tarkovsky and into the treacly terrain of Roberto Benigni, without the laughs. An unsuccessful fusion of his masterpiece Landscape in the Mist -- one of the greatest films about the corruption of childhood innocence -- and his Ulysses's Gaze -- a dazzling but uneven exploration of memory and mortality -- Eternity and a Day achieves moments of undeniable power but succumbs to sentimentality and platitudes.

That's to be expected when the main characters are a curmudgeonly old man and a cute waif. Alexandre (Bruno Ganz, his European Everyman appeal swamped by a bushy beard and dubbed Greek dialogue), a famous Greek poet with a fatal disease, finds that, like the professor in Bergman's Wild Strawberries or the translator in Tarkovsky's Nostalghia (not to mention Dickens's Ebenezer Scrooge), he must face the meaningless of accomplishment and the terror of solitude in the face of impending death. As he rises for the last time in his ancestral home by the sea, his mind drifts to other days in the same place -- as a boy bathing on the beach with friends, or more lingeringly, with his late wife, Anna (Isabelle Renauld) at a family reunion, a key memory that on this final day he cannot shake.

Having abandoned his last project -- the completion of a poem left unfinished by a 19th-century Greek poet -- and estranged from his daughter, who not only won't take in his dog but has sold his house to developers, Alexandre has nothing better to do before checking into the hospital than to follow the van whisking away an illegal Albanian alien (Achilleas Skevis) who had washed his windshield at an intersection. The boy is taken to an abandoned construction site, where he's auctioned off with others in a black-market adoption ring, an eerie but contrived-looking scene (though based apparently on an actual experience) that ends with Alexandre and the little refugee leaving together -- the moribund past and the desperate future seeking reconciliation as they wander through the past and present together.

It's a bumpy odyssey. Eternity is at its best when image and music (the soundtrack by Angelopoulos collaborator Giorgos Patsas is as haunting as Zbigniew Preisner's work with Kieslowski) take over from the sophomoric monologues and evoke a meditative timelessness or disclose an unexpected beauty. This is especially true when the film sticks closest to the here and now, acknowledging the tragedy of recent events in the Balkans. Determined to return the boy to his homeland (a variation on Harvey Keitel's quest to track down lost, antique film footage in Bosnia in Ulysses's Gaze), Alexandre drives him to the snowbound, mountainous frontier. A chain-link fence looms out of the mist, and a long slow pan reveals dozens of silhouetted bodies clinging to it like shades from the Underworld or musical notes on a staff. It's an ambiguous vision of the border between different states -- political, existential, mental -- and of the mystery of signification and the imagination, from which both Alexandre and Angelopoulos regrettably retreat.

Instead, they get on the bus, a magical mystery special boarded by such allegorical figures as a man arguing for new art forms spurned by his beloved, and the Byronic poet whose poem Alexandre had tried to complete decked out in darkly romantic Caspar David Friedrich finery. This fable about politics and aesthetics is only a brief detour, however, as is the Albanian boy's tearjerking plight. As night falls, Alexandre is drawn back to that other day, the family gathering on the beach some three decades before, a celebration of the birth of the daughter who would later deny him. His wife, mother, and father all are there, posed about a proscenium-like pavilion, as is Alexandre in his grizzled, black-clad present state. The memory grows with each repetition in sun-drenched intensity, and it seems as if the film might achieve a Proustian epiphany of recovered time.

Words, though, get in the way, not to mention bathos. Angelopoulos's pompous incantations about art and time, love and beauty, undermine their manifestation on the screen. Maybe that's the point, that we try to seize the eternity of the moment, through art, language, and the imagination, at the risk of losing the consolations of everyday life. Unlike his best films, however, in Eternity and a Day Angelopoulos fails to embrace either.