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A Masterpiece!

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

Remarkable film where the camera does almost all of the work. Poignant ending as what must have seemed a symbol of hope now looks like a commentary on a Europe about to revert to tribalism and cold, cruel borders. The central plot about the disappeared politician doesn't seem central or integrated to the rest of the film: Moreau and Mastroianni are almost wasted, despite their strong, understated performances. The film moves because of its uncanny sense of atmosphere: bleak, impoverished life on the edge which might be that of refugees anywhere today. Music used very sparingly and powerfully, especially the amateurish renderings of Let It Be and Silent Night. Elsewhere, the sounds of the river and the wind recall moments in Antonioni. A film which may be more powerful now than when it was conceived.

This was my first, and probably the last Angelopoulos movie. I was eager to get into it, as it featured Mastroianni, one of my favorite actors and was a film By Theo, of whom I've heard a lot. The opening was promising, a long shot over a jeep of soldiers across the Albanian-Greek border. OK! but that was all. Nothing left. The movie had big holes and I don't know which to mention first. The main plot of the story is revealed to the journalist by the old woman. during a long walk. It's like a 15 minutes monologue, killing the action and viewers patience, nothing happening on screen for 15 or even 20 minutes, apart this old lady telling a story. All that is presumed to be shown through action, was simply told to the camera by the old lady. In a moment, the equippe of TV was heading to the bar. They turn the corner and immediately the winter begins! Probably, shot in different days, continuity leaked. A lot of problems with the story-telling, it went from absurd to irrational never sticking to a style, making the viewer asking questions that never got answers. Poor Mastroianni, given a role which lacked integrity or charm. On the other hand, as many Greeks or Albanians or Balcan people would agree with, the movies showed lot of historic, ethnic, or politically incorrectness, just for the sake of making a movie about "humanity" as a red in another review. A lot more to say, but no time to lose on a poor movie, which was not movie at all, but lunacies of a person impressed on film and paid with state money.

As with all of Angelopoulos' films, "The Suspended Step of the Stork" implicitly demands a close and intimate participation on the part of the viewer, a fact that has certainly contributed to the limited popularity of his work. Dialogues are sparing, with no monologues or exchanges exteriorizing the characters' inner conflicts, doubts, or feelings. The filmmaker prefers to keep the viewers away from their own emotional responses, and instead forces them to explore and study the characters' identities for themselves. As a result, the acting is understated and implicit, as opposed to overt and explicit.The action scenes are set between long intervals of contemplation, where the viewer is asked to become a participant, to participate as an actor, by probing his or her own psyche. As in a novel, where the drama rests entirely on the author's writing to provide a template where the reader's imagination and/or past experience flourish, Angelopoulos' drama rests within his images: his uses of the long shots, the long takes, the leisurely pacing, the sparing dialogues that have become his trademark, inviting the viewer to experience the film from his or her personal perspective. Angelopoulos uses silence to capture moments of high intensity, reverting to the non-verbal language of gestures, gazes, sounds, and music, when he believes that words can only take us so far.The music, by Angelopoulos' long time collaborator, Eleni Karaindrou, provides more than just a discreet background, but becomes itself a dramatic element of the story. A large part of the film consists of exterior shots in subtle, subdued colors, recorded in a drab winter light. Angelopoulos presents us with an "other Greece," one far different from the Greece of the tourist brochures, with ethereal blue skies and emerald seas, drowned in an eternal sunshine. Here, the skies are covered and gray, the air is cold and misty, and the sands of the pristine beaches have been replaced by the trampled, dirty snow of the village streets. Angelopoulos' genius through Arvanitis' camera is on display throughout the film."The Suspended Step of the Stork" is above all else a political statement aimed at the socio-political situation in the Balkans at the end of the twentieth century. It is deeply concerned with the meaning of "borders," and with those who are the victims of the confusion between nations. In the "waiting room" facing the Albanian border, the refugees, political or other, outcast by the rest of humanity, wait. They may be stuck against a political border, but unfortunately they still carry with them, and hang on, deeper ancestral borders: those of the languages, of the customs, and of the races. Although Angelopoulos' political views are well known, the film steers clear of any political discourse regarding the causes of the refugees' plights. In the process, Angelopoulos forces us to meditate on the concepts of geographical, cultural, political, and personal "borders." Angelopoulos considers himself a historian of twentieth century Greece, and he likes to bring lessons from the Hellenic myths into his discussions. In this film, he does some border crossing himself between the Greek and Italian cultures, drawing from a combined Homeric and Dantesque tradition of Odysseus' travel. Alexander is a Telemachus, in search of a story about an aging Greek politician/Odysseus who disappeared, never to be heard of again. This political man, a brilliant orator, unexpectedly and inexplicably left the comfort of his bourgeois existence, his wife, and his brilliant career, to live anonymously in a refugee camp with the lowest of the low. He became a poet in exile wondering how to change the world. Of course, the "politician" is not Alexander's father, but the "politician" stands before Alexander like a father figure/Odysseus. As with Homer's Telemachus, Alexander grows as a person during his odyssey.Of course, it would be wrong to try and see in the film a retelling of Homer's Odyssey in a contemporary context. Angelopoulos draws on Odysseus's travels only as structuring and thematic elements for his film. In Angelopoulos' ending, "Odysseus" is more like the Dante's Odysseus: he does not leave for Ithaca but goes on, "carrying a suitcase." And Alexander/Telemachus is "suspended" between returning to his home and his career, or embarking on a voyage to "somewhere else." He states as much, in a voice-over at the beginning of the film, paraphrasing few lines from Dante's "Inferno": "And don't forget that the time for a voyage has come again. The wind blows your eyes far away." Finally, although Angelopoulos is not a religious person, there is a Greek Orthodox religious theme introduced during the film in the form of the yellow-suited linesmen, who go around bettering things for their fellow human beings by reconnecting communications, and also the Christ-like figure of the "politician." In the final scene, these men in yellow demonstrate once more the Byzantine iconography's influence in Angelopoulos' work. They appear like "stylites," religious figures found in the Orthodox tradition, solitary and fervent men who took up their abode upon the tops of pillars, in a form of asceticism.The film ends without a resolution as to the true identity of the character played by Mastroianni. Angelopoulos does not give us any clues, and the wife's statement, "It's not him," is far from convincing and left ambiguous enough. The important question of the film is not whether he is or is not the vanished politician, but that he could be the politician. But the film still ends on an optimistic note. Whereas the wires strung from pole to pole run only along the river, and thus communications across the border are still not possible, and it remains impenetrable, we note that this final scene is taken from a point of view across the river: the camera has crossed the border, and the reverse tracking shot is inviting Alexander and the viewer to follow beyond the boundary. On this account, Angelopoulos gives us hope that somehow, some of the borders will eventually crumble.

Having only ever seen one Angelopoulos film before - The Travelling Players, which thrilled me about as much as paint drying on a wall - I was unprepared for the revelation that is The Suspended Step of the Stork. Shot over a decade ago, this long metaphysical tale of desperate refugees and disenchanted politicians has become more contemporary with each intervening year. As if a lone Greek film-maker had somehow prophesied the horrors of Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq - and the creeping paralysis that has overtaken Western democracy.It begins in a refugee camp on the Greek-Albanian border, where a TV journalist spots an elderly man (Marcello Mastroianni) and decides he is a leading politician who went missing years before. Tracing the man's 'widow' (Jeanne Moreau) the reporter gropes his way towards the film's central dilemma. What could make a progressive intellectual lose all faith in humanity, to the extent that he gives up not only his political career but also his very identity?This sounds like dry stuff indeed, and so it might be without the alchemical power of Angelopoulous's camera. There are sequences here that beg for inclusion in an anthology of all-time cinema greats. The tracking-shot along a disused train, each carriage inhabited by a penniless refugee family. The wedding across the river, with bride and groom stranded on opposite sides by the arbitrary idiocy of national borders, which veers perilously close to kitsch but never succumbs.Moreau is magnificent, Mastroianni his genial hangdog self, but neither actor could ever mistake this film for a star vehicle. If there is a star here, it's the soul of humanity itself. A soul neither living nor dead, but held in suspended animation.