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170 MINUTES | GREEK | MFA Greek director Theo Angelopoulos makes no bones about being stagy. His latest film, the first of a trilogy, opens with the title "Scene 1." It’s 1919, and refugees pose at a riverbank outside Thessaloniki. Their leader, Spyros, addresses the camera, explaining how the Red Army routed them from their home in Odessa and how they have now been given this land to settle. The little girl holding the hand of his son Alexis’s hand is Eleni, a foundling. The stage then shifts to Greek tragedy, as years later a widowed Spyros marries Eleni, only to have her stolen by Alexis on their wedding day. The resultant curse dogs the couple, and their country, through the Falangist takeover, the Axis invasion, and civil war — all rendered in elegant compositions and tracking shots (one filched, in homage, no doubt, from Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds). Unlike Angelopoulos’s previous films, such as The Traveling Players, here the characters are mere mannequins in tableaux vivants. The meadow might weep, but the audience is left cold.
BY PETER KEOUGH
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