Eternity and a Day
Theo Angelopoulos, Greece/France/Italy/Germany, 1998, 133 mins; Artificial Eye video
Review by Gerald Houghton (1999)
Greece. Bruno Ganz is Alexander, a terminally ill poet determined to set his affairs in order before retiring to a hospice to die. Visiting his daughter he is mortified to discover that she and her husband have sold his old house beside the sea. Later he rescues a young refugee (Ahilleas Skevis) from an illegal adoption ring and, after unsuccessfully attempting to return the boy to his Albanian home, decides that maybe a life in exile would be for the best. The two take to the road together.
Oddly, given that Eternity And A Day operates on a far smaller, far more internalised canvass than Theo Angelopoulos’s previous film, the hypnotic three hour Ulysses’ Gaze, its style is almost urgent in comparison. Not that that means anything in terms of even most European, let alone American cinema. Angelopoulos is of the old school, a dying breed of stately, poised, relentlessly [serious] film-makers, and this, a deserved Cannes Palme d’Or winner in 1998, is very much part of the grand art house tradition that we regrettably see less and less of these days.
Urgent, in these terms at least, means that takes do not last ten minutes. What they do have, however, like the films of Italian grandmaster Antonioni, is duration, fluidity, a [weight] that entrances. Angelopoulos’ work is all about creating space within frames to admit the audience, his films are both embracing and reflective. Unlike so much contemporary cinema, these are works almost never about what we see on their dusty, elegant surfaces. They retain, almost by default, a casual surrealism that Angelopoulos very much plays up to here, having Alexander literally walk into memories of his late wife and the life they shared, of the stories he tells the boy, and, in particular, of the strange final bus journey the pair take. The mist-shrouded border fence, strung with bodies like notes on a musical stave, clings to the memory like Ulysses’ sodium-washed crossing point and massed umbrellas.
Ganz (German and therefore unfortunately dubbed) is perfectly cast - and that despite rumoured lobbying from Harvey Keitel, star of Angelopoulos’ last. Ganz, of course, led the ethereal splendours of Wenders’ Wings of Desire, and here, sporting salt and pepper beard and battered Armani overcoat, looks like his angel gone to seed. Fortunately, for much of the time it’s not what he says that really counts, it’s his exhausted gait, the weight pressing down on old shoulders that invites us into his - and the film’s - wintery melancholy.
Beautifully shot by Giorgos Arvanitis and perfectly scored, again, by Eleni Karaindrou, Eternity And A Day serves as a reminder of what film used to be like, before Star Wars, before Tarantino and, most especially, before irony. It’s deliberately slow, eloquently meditative cinema that demands patience but rewards it with an elegant convergence, like Alexander’s own life, towards pure poetry.