last year in the mist

My dad recommended that I see a Greek film called "Landscape in the Mist." He's usually right on when it comes to films, and since I'm a foreign film junkie with a high tolerance for slow-paced dramas, I put the film at the top of my queue.

I can only compare this film to "Last Year at Marienbad." Painfully slow and abstract. I fell asleep at countless occasions and basically kept waiting for something to happen. A couple things do happen, but seem to happen in a vacuum and don't move the story forward. And the motivations of each character are never truly conveyed.

There was one scene in which a gigantic marble hand is helicoptered out of the Mediterranean. I'm all for symbolism in films, but in this case, for me anyway, the big hand only seemed to symbolize the heavy-handed filmmaking of the director.

Both Marienbad and Landscape should be classified more as art than film and viewers deserve the disclaimer.

I'm not usually a fan of action films, but in this case, Theo Angelopoulos, the filmmaker, could have learned a thing or two by watching the Matthew Bourne series a few times, had they been available in the 80's.