The only sin that can't be forgiven is despair.

Meteora
Spiros Stathoulopoulos 2012 Greece
Starring: Theo Alexander, Tamila Koulieva, Giorgos Karakantas, Dimitris Hristidis


Despite the financial crisis Greece has experienced in recent years its cinematic world seems to be going through a renaissance of sorts, much in the same way as the Romanian scene has of late. Of course the great Greek director Theo Angelopoulos made a number of intelligent, masterful films over the space of several decades but much of his work took place in other countries and featured foreign actors. This new renaissance as I see it started in 2009 with Yorgos Lanthimos' disturbing and genuinely bizarre Dogtooth and continued with Athina Rachel Tsangari's complex, brilliant Attenberg and Lanthimos' 2011 effort Alps. Pleasingly Spiros Stathoulopoulos' Meteora is totally different from any of those works and utterly innovative, mixing as it does beautiful landscapes, a sensitive arthouse love story and alarming animated sequences depicting mazes of blood and land cracking open to reveal visions of hell, and juxtaposing modern methods with traditional Orthodox sensibility. The narrative of priests or nuns being tempted by human desire and each other has often been played for titillation in a veritable banquet of soft-porn films but here, much as in last year's wonderful Diderot adaptation The Nun, it never feels exploitative and for the most part remains overtly non-sexual, instead concentrating on the irresistible connection between the lovers and the unavoidable guilt they feel. The repressive nature of religious discipline is a major theme, shown via ambiguous set-pieces such as the ever-present bandage on Urania's hand (is it merely a accidental injury or the aftereffects of an archaic form of penance?) and a net that Urania willingly climbs into before rising up the mountainside in it (a mode of torture or simply a means of getting about in the monolithic terrain? And, if the former, who is pulling its ropes?). It's a incredible, magnetic piece of work that, considering the contrasting styles and that leading man Theo Alexander is best known for playing Talbot in True Blood and Tamila Koulieva is a Russian TV actress, really shouldn't work but somehow it lingers in the mind and is never less than captivating. On the evidence of this and the aforementioned films it seems as if there's a dark undercurrent in modern Greek life that has resulted in a deep strangeness but, as ever, strangeness and undercurrents make for awe-inspiring cinema.