Landscape in the Mist is the creation of director Theo Angelopoulos, known as a cinematic poet. On the surface, the plot of the film is very straight forward. Two Greek children, in search of their father, who, they have been told, lives in Germany, undertake a trek from Greece to Germany through a savage world dominated by adults. Yet, very little of this poetic and surreal road film is actually on the surface.

The Story: The two children are 14-year-old Voula (Tania Palaiologou) and her 5-year-old brother Alexander (Michalis Zeke). As the film opens, they live with their mother, who apparently keeps her distance from them. They are extremely close to one another, however. Voula tells stories to Alexander as they prepare to fall asleep, especially one story that is a variation on the Book of Genesis. “In the beginning . . .there was the light . . .” Alexander has a deep longing to meet his father. The children compose letters to him in their thoughts. They have been told by their mother that their father lives in Germany. Early in the film, however, we learn that this was a fabrication of convenience on the part of their mother, sparing her the discomfort of telling them that they are illegitimate. The mother doesn’t even know who their fathers are. Nevertheless, for the children, the vision of their father living in Germany is the gospel truth.

Alexander has recurrent dreams of meeting his father. He feels that he could reach out in his dreams and touch his father’s hand. The children go down to the railway station each day, hoping to hop on a train. They have no idea about the realities of travel or geography – no cash, no passports, no tickets, no know-how. A friendly vender at the station asks them why they come there every day. We see the children very nearly board a train, but the door closes in front of them at the last moment and they stand silently for several minutes, with heads drooped, as the train pulls away. We see them only from behind.

The next day, however, the children succeed in hopping the train at the last possible moment, launching their search which cannot possibly succeed. They sit together on the floor at the end of a long railcar corridor until they are discovered by the conductor. Realizing that they are stowaways, he puts them off at the next station. It happens to be a small town where an uncle lives. When the police come to retrieve the children, they are taken to their uncle (Dimitris Kaberidis), but he refuses them. It is he who reveals that the German father is a figment of the mother’s creative dishonesty, but the children do not believe him. At the police station, it begins to snow. Apparently snow is such a rare occurrence in this part of Greece that the adults are all mesmerized by its appearance. The children take the opportunity to make a run for it.

After a long walk, Voula and Alexander find themselves standing on a street corner in a small town as snow is falling. A woman dressed in a wedding dress comes racing out from a building across the street, weeping. The groom comes chasing after her, consoles her, leads her back. Voula and Alexander just stand and watch. We hear the sounds of a vehicle approaching. Finally it pulls into view. It is a tractor with something in tow – a live horse, a live horse being cruelly towed along on its side! The rope snaps depositing the horse virtually at the feet of the children. They watch as it goes through its death throes. Alexander begins to sob. Across the street, the wedding party bursts forth from the church or inn, skipping and singly gaily.

Voula and Alexander proceed on foot together, walking miles along a road through remote mountainous terrain. They seem like tiny waifs against the rugged wild landscape. They encounter a decrepit bus-shaped van stopped by the side of the road, being repaired by its owner, Orestes (Stratos Tzortzoglou). He is a handsome young man, in his late twenties, perhaps, with a sweeping spray of dark hair. He is friendly, notes that they are very far from the next village, and offers them a ride. Voula is understandably cautious and reticent, but they finally accept the pleasant man’s offer. Orestes is a biker and a member of an acting troupe, whom they meet up with in the next town. Work has become very scarce for the troupe and the town’s only performance hall has been booked for another event. The troupe mostly mopes around here and in subsequent scenes on the seashore. Orestes finds a small fragment of film strip among some trash, with alternating gray and black sections. He asks Alexander, “Can’t you see behind the mist, in the distance, can’t you see a tree.” It is the mist of the imagination to which he refers.

After parting company with Orestes and the troupe, Voula and Alexander hitch a ride with a truck driver (Vassilis Kolovos). He treats them well enough at first, but after he has a run-in with another trucker at a truck stop over a comely waitress, he turns surly. At a rest area, while Alexander is sleeping, he coaxes and then drags Voula into the back of the truck. Although we see only the canvass back of the truck, we know full well what is happening inside and the camera lingers interminably. This sensitively filmed scene illustrates poignantly that sexual violence does not have to be filmed graphically for the episode to have a powerful emotional impact. Finally, we see the heartless, lecherous driver emerge with his shirt partly hanging out of his pants. A minute or two later, we see the broken-hearted and traumatized Voula emerge, her hand splattered with blood. They try to board a train, but have to beat a hasty retreat when the police show up looking for them.

They reencounter Orestes and his motorcycle just in time for him to help them get away. He takes a shine to the kids and they to him. On a beach, he offers to teach Voula how to dance, but she, in her innocence, falls in love with him, virtually on first touch and eye contact. Orestes says to Alexander, “Let’s leave her. Today she has discovered something very great! He means first love. Orestes spots a large object bobbing up and down among the waves of the ocean. A helicopter appears overhead, tethered to the object, slowly hauling it out of the sea. It is the huge hand of a statue – shaped like the hand of creation – apparently being recovered from an underwater burial. With the massive hand hanging underneath, the helicopter flies off. Orestes is a tower of strength in the eyes of the children, but even he disappoints Voula in the end. They are hanging out in a dance club and she observes him hooking up with another guy for a quickie in the back room. She is heartbroken. She and Alexander depart. Orestes catches up with them and tries to console her, but she is inconsolable.

Voula and Alexander find their way to a train station, hoping to complete their journey to the border. Voula inquires about the cost of the tickets, but they have no money. Unfortunately, she has learned the ways of the world too well. Spotting a lone soldier standing on the platform, she asks, “Will you let me have 385 drachmas?”, which is the sum of money needed for the tickets. The soldier eyes her repeatedly, looks anxious and pensive, lights a cigarette, obviously mulling over what he might ask her to do for the money. He paces, looks unsure, then walks across the tracks where there are inactive railcars that will provide a degree of privacy in the spaces between. After a few moments, she follows, intent on doing whatever is required to obtain the needed cash. He asks her name. She says nothing. Suddenly, he is upset with himself and says, “I’ve said something dumb again.” He leaves the money on a step on one of the cars and walks away. This is a very profound exchange. In asking her name, he tried to humanize what was to be an essentially dehumanizing exchange. In not answering, she was saying that whatever you do, you will not be doing it with me as a person, only as an object. Realizing the truth of her silence, he recognized that he could not go through with it. This soldier represents the reality of most human beings – torn to pieces between selfish desires and the intent, at least, to meet basic standards of decency.

SPOILER ALERT: SKIP NEXT PARAGRAPH IF YOU PLAN TO SEE THE FILM

Voula and Alexander board the train for the last leg of their journey to the border, proudly handing their tickets to the conductor. As they near the border, they hear an announcement for passengers to get their passports ready. Having none, they leave the train. Later, in the dark, they sneak across the border, hide under the floodlight tower, and locate a boat. Still unafraid, they drift out into the river. They are spotted and apparently shot. They emerge into a dense mist. Alexander says, “Wake up, we’re in Germany.” Through the mist, they make out the form of a solitary tree. They rush to the tree and soon their distant silhouettes are indistinguishable from the tree itself.

Themes: This is a highly poetic and symbolic film and difficult to fully comprehend or interpret. On one level, it has to do with existential isolation and the search for connection. The mother can be seen as religion providing children with a story (doctrine) of a distant father (God) from which they can derive hope. It is false hope, however. Voula and Alexander embark on a one-way journey (the journey of life) toward the land where the father dwells (heaven), encountering something like the range of people that exist in real life. There is the evil man (the lecherous truck driver), the good man, though compromised by hedonism (Orestes), and the ambivalent man (the soldier at the train station). They reach the border (death) and pass into the mist (the universal realm). There they encounter – not their father – but the tree of life. They become one with the tree of life, which can be viewed metaphorically as the tree of evolution or the family tree of man. The bond that they have been denied by the absence of their father(s) is restored in death.

At another level, this film is about the condition of Angelopoulos’s homeland, Greece. The out-of-work theater troupe, preoccupied with the history of invasions and battles that have impacted Greece, represent the older generation in Greece – lethargic, dispirited, and generally burned-out. Orestes represents the younger generation of Greece – full of life and energy, caring and kind, ready to serve and help the needy, but also compromised by his own hedonistic needs. On the environmental level, Angelopoulos is also contrasting the beauty of unspoiled, rural Greece with the squalor of her industrialized sectors. The hand of the statue rising out of the ocean tethered to a helicopter represents the uneasy link between ancient Greece and its modern, technological society.

Production Values: This is not a mediocre film in any sense. It is a film with extraordinary strengths combined with some substantial inadequacies. For film lovers, Landscape in the Mist is worth seeing for its lofty poetic beauty despite its irritating flaws. This movie is as beautifully filmed as any that you’ll ever see. All of the film takes place under overcast skies, with dim and indirect lighting, and sometimes in mist. The colors are therefore blanched and pale. Much of the film is reminiscent of Antonioni’s Red Desert, emphasizing bleak industrial landscapes. All of it has the feel of sleepwalking through a dream. The performances by the two child actors are really quite astounding. They never overplay their parts for cheap sentimentality. The soundtrack is lovely and haunting with a major emphasis on cello strains.

Angelopoulos prefers long set shots which he then combines with brilliant choreography. For example, the entire scene involving the horse in tow and the wedding revelers was shot with the camera in one position, thus underscoring the intertwining of various simultaneous existences in human society. The endlessly traveling troupe of actors is referential to one of Angelopoulous’s own earlier films, The Travelling Players.

One aspect of this film that will be more problematic for some viewers than others is that it is inherently somber and depressing. Don’t pick this film if you dislike “downer” films or are in a negative frame of mind.

The second problem is that the film is unusually slow-paced. The only other film I can think of offhand that is equally slow-paced is the French film La Belle Noiseuse. You might want to be sedated with your drug of preference before you sit down to watch Landscape in the Mist. Angelopoulous holds his shots for an unusually long time. I think that I could tolerate that pace, given the emotional depth of the film, if the narrative did not also become badly side-tracked from the engaging story of the children’s journey to ponderous sociopolitical asides. The entire boring and unnecessary business of the out-of-work stage troupe as well as the hand of the statue rising out of the sea could be cut out with no diminishment in the film’s core value. This was a film badly in need of the sure hand of a skilled editor. The extremely leisurely pace could have worked had the film been limited to its most emotionally charged core and shortened overall.

Bottom-Line: If you’re into cinematic poetry, this could be the film for you. It is soulfully intense and somber and almost mythic in its proportions. Landscape in the Mist won the top prize at the 1988 Venice Film Festival. Be warned, however, that this is NOT a film for all viewers. It will elicit mainly feelings of despair or depression for some viewers. I can’t recommend this film for those who seek mainly entertainment, action, or an emotional boost from their film viewing experiences. If and when you’re in the mood for an intensely moving tragic poem, then think about pulling this film down off the shelf. Landscape in the Mist is filmed in Greek with English subtitles and has a running time of 126 minutes.


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You might want to check out these other excellent films from Greece:

Eternity and a Day
Z

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age