– Aristotelis Maragkos crafts an elegy for inherited masculinity and impossible dreams, following a man who rebuilds a boat in a final attempt to assert his identity
Christos Passalis in Beachcomber
Elias (Christos Passalis, known for Dogtooth [+see also:
film review
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interview: Yorgos Lanthimos
film profile]) is forty-plus and wears a map of nautical tattoos on his skin telling stories which aren’t his. He lives in a Greek coastal town where time stands still, leading a routined life awash with unmet expectations. When he finds a Russian wreck buried in the sand – a boat reduced to scrap metal, like a monument to defeat – he decides it will be his way out. He’ll restore the ship, sell it and change his life. It’s a crazy project which fast becomes an obsession.
Presented in competition in Thessaloniki and now competing in Bari’s Bif&st, Aristotelis Maragkos’ second work, Beachcomber, invites us to descend into the psyche of a man crushed by the myth of paternal authority. Elias’ sailor father disappeared at sea years earlier, leaving behind stories and a void which his son tries to fill by adopting his father’s identity. The tattoos he carves into his skin are visual references to a life he’s never lived, attempts to write his own story through another person’s tale. The boat becomes the transitional object between what Elias is and what he’d like to be.
The film is openly inspired by the poetry of Nikos Kavvadias, a twentieth century Greek sailor-poet who saw the sea as a land of existential exile. Maragkos translates that vision into a fragmentary narrative, built upon allusions and silences. Giorgos Karvelas, heading up photography, prioritises natural light, shooting faces against blurry backdrops. Rather than a picture-postcard tourist spot, the coast becomes a prison characterised by scorching heat, rust, and spaces where time stands still.
Gravitating around Elias is a small crew of dreamers: Tasia (Aliki Andriomenou), a female figure who observes the world with fatalistic lucidity, and other companions played by Stathis Kokkoris, Sotiris Belsis, Lefteris Polychronis, Eleni Karageorgis and Gioula Bountali. People weathered by the climate and by stagnation, and drawn to the project out of a need to belong rather than faith in its outcome. Thodoris Armaos has edited the film according to emotional rather than chronological associations, blending an array of visual footage into a flux which favours psychological temperatures over a linear narrative.
Unfortunately, the film’s allegorical ambition ends up suffocating its human dimension. Elias is more a living embodiment of symbols than a character (his tattooed body, the impossible restoration project, the absent father), who never becomes fully three-dimensional. Maragkos directs his movie with admirable control, building up the story through silence and Passalis’ minimal movements, but the screenplay the director penned with Chrysoula Korovesi denies the protagonist any real psychological evolution. As a result, we experience Elias’ restoration attempt as some kind of rite whose deeper significance eludes us.
What’s more, the film’s fragmentary structure works when conveying the protagonist’s inner disarray, but less so when it becomes a stylistic feature for its own sake. There are powerful visual moments – the enormous ship in all its metallic immobility, the physicality of bodies toiling under the searing sun – but there are also long stretches where the film seems to go round in circles, repeating the same melancholy notes without ever developing them.
Beachcomber is an ambitious work which deliberately chooses not to pander to audiences, rooted in a contemporary Greek film tradition which turns formal harshness and existential pessimism into its trademark. The tightness of the film’s narrative isn’t always convincing, but it does take a serious approach to tackling the theme of the construction of male identity through inherited fatherhood, and failure as the only possible path to freedom.
Beachcomber was produced by Plankton.
(Translated from Italian)
