The surprise winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1998 was Eternity and a Day by Greek director Theo Angelopoulos. The vast majority of American viewers will find it both slow and obscure, though some of the cinematography is a treat. Even for viewers with patience and interest in philosophical themes, there’s not a lot very profound accomplished in the end.

Historical Background: Theo Angelopoulos was born in Athens, April 27th, 1935. He graduated in Law from the University of Athens, but quickly discovered that his real interest lay in the arts. He published essays, poetry, and short stories, and worked as a film critic from 1964-7. He directed a short in 1968 called The Broadcast. His first feature film was Reconstruction in 1970. As his films began winning awards at film festivals, Angelopoulos gained international recognition and the reputation as Greece’s top contemporary director. Angelopoulos also typically writes or collaborates on the scripts for his films. Travelling Players (1975) won Best Film from the British Film Institute. Alexander the Great (1980) won a Golden Lion at the 1980 Venice Film Festival and Landscape in the Mist (1988), arguably his best film, shared the Silver Lion at Venice in 1988. Eternity and a Day took the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1998, though it lost out to Life is Beautiful that year for the American Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Angelopoulos is often referred to as a cinematic poet. His principal influences are Bergman and Tarkovsky.

The Story: There is little plot or action in this film, certainly not enough to sustain the average American viewer expecting more in the way of stimulation for their entertainment dollar. Alexander (Bruno Ganz) awakens on what is scheduled to be the last day of his life before he enters a hospital from which he will never emerge. He is terminally ill, in continuous pain, and approaching the final stages of his disease process. Alexander is awash in memories and regrets as he struggles to find meaning in his life and acceptance of death. The only interesting thing about Alexander’s current life is that there is an unknown person living in an adjacent apartment building who plays matching music whenever Alexander turns on his music.

Among other difficulties, Alexander must find a caretaker for his dog. He visits his married daughter (Iris Chatziantoniou) at her modern and rather uninviting apartment. She is so wound up in her own life that she has little capacity to tune into her father’s situation, though it is evident that the distance between the two is at least as much his doing as hers. He is only able to tell her that he will be going away for a while, not that he is dying. He hopes to unload his dog on her and has brought along some letters written by her mother (his deceased wife), Anna (Isabelle Renauld). His daughter begins reading one of the letters, which triggers memories in Alexander’s mind. The letter is about one “perfect” day when Alexander had agreed to set aside his work and devote an entire day to being with his wife as they introduced their new baby (this same daughter) to their relatives and friends. His wife’s words reveal a longing on her part for more of Alexander’s time and attention:

I am writing to you by the sea. Again and again, I write to you and talk to you. When you happen to recall this day, remember, that I looked at it as if I were all eyes, caressed it as if I were all hands, I stand here and wait for you, trembling. Give me this day.

The father-daughter tête a tête is spoiled, however, when the son-in-law (Vassilis Seimenis) emerges from the bathroom to complain about the dog and unceremoniously announces that Alexander’s beloved seaside home has been sold and will soon be demolished. This is the home where the fondest of Alexander’s memories took place.

Alexander must now try to pawn off his dog on his housekeeper, Urania (Eleni Gerasimidou), whose son is getting married that day. There is a long scene depicting the beautiful stylish and ritualized dancing of the bride and groom for this Greek wedding. Ultimately, Alexander awkwardly hand the dog’s leash to the groom’s mother.

As Alexander is driving about town, he comes to an intersection where homeless street urchins (Albanian refugees) race out to wash windshields for change during the red lights. Just as Alexander is pulling away from the light, a police raid begins aimed at rounding up the vagrant boys and shipping them back to Albania. As the cops chase down the boys, one boy (Achileas Skevis) draws close to Alexander’s car and Alexander decides impulsively to help him out, opening the passenger door and inviting him to get in. After thus helping the boy elude the police, Alexander drops him off on a side street. Later, however, Alexander happens to observe the same boy and a friend being kidnapped and decides to follow the truck in which they’ve been taken. He discovers an illicit child adoption ring in operation where homeless boys are being sold to wealthy couples unable to legally adopt children. Alexander manages to purchase the rights to his little friend and once again “rescue” him.

Alexander has no idea what to do with the boy, however. He drives him to a snowy border checkpoint in the mountains where countless would-be refugees cling hopefully but senselessly to a formidable fence that separates Albania from Greece. When the boy tells Alexander that he has no remaining relatives back in Albania, Alexander decides to drive off with the boy instead of repatriating him.

Alexander pays a visit to his aged mother (Despina Bebedeli) in a nursing home. She is too senile to comprehend anything that Alexander might want to tell her. He rather pointlessly pleads to her, “Tell me mother, why didn’t we know how to love?” There is a rigidity in their interactions.

The bond between the dying Alexander and the homeless boy, based on mutual aloneness, continues to deepen. Alexander shares a story with the Albanian boy about a famous Greek poet, Dionysios Solomos (1798-1857) This poet grew up in Italy but returned to Greece when the Revolution began around 1818. He wanted to write poetry to inspire the revolutionaries but did not yet know enough Greek, so he traveled around purchasing words from villagers. We see the poet (Fabrizio Bentivoglio), decked out in 19th-century finery with black top hat, fawning over some of his new purchases, such as “abyss,” “perfumed,” “dewy,” “unknown,” “redolent,” and “moonstruck.” Solomos then used these words to create poems, such as Hymn to Liberty (the first verses of which now comprise the Greek National Anthem) and the unfinished Free Besieged (the completion of which was Alexander’s final but unfinished project as well).

Alexander does not want to spend his last few hours of “freedom” by himself and the boy has no one to care for him. They take a bus ride together, during which every manner of passenger gets on and off, most laden with symbolic inferences. There’s a man toting a red flag, a couple who argue over new trends in art, and a trio of musicians. Alexander delivers his little charge to a ferry boat that is to take him to his future, though it wasn’t clear to me where the boat was going. The brightly lighted ship pulls slowly off into the dusk.

Alexander heads to the beach in front of his old home, which is also the site of many of his fond old memories, losing himself once again in memories of his wife. He recalls his wife telling him that tomorrow lasts for an eternity and a day and decides that the future will not, after all, come to an end with the end of this particular day.

Themes: This film touches on several “deep” themes pertaining to fundamentals of existence. One key issue might be succinctly summarized as words versus action, but on the level of personal psychology, it is also the question of introversion versus extroversion. The protagonist, Alexander, is a renowned Greek writer. His doctor comments in passing that “Our generation grew up with your books and verses,” so despite Alexander having regrets about “never finishing anything,” it is clear that he has, in fact, finished many of his projects until recently. Alexander, like many writers and intellectuals, lives in the world of words, but like the Greek poet Solomos, Alexander has paid a price for his words and for all of his involvement in language. He has been a workaholic who devoted relatively little time to the simpler, nonverbal pleasures of living. His obsession with words as art has ironically left him with two few words for the members of his family. His loving wife had longed for more of his time, to simply dance together or smile at one another, but he had all too often been consumed with his work. Now he wonders, “Why have I felt at home only in those rare moments when granted the grace to speak my language, my own language, when I could still recover words or retrieve forgotten words from the silence? Why is it that only then could I hear the sound of my footsteps echoing in my house again?”

Like many an introvert and wordsmith before him, Alexander could only feel truly alive when immersed in his world of words. Literature, poetry, and the arts are, of course, an invaluable kind of communication but it is mostly communication at a distance. The writer or artist has relatively little contact with most of his audience. Novelists meet few of their readers, painters meet few of the visitors to museums or galleries, directors meet few members of the audiences of movie theaters. Something is lost even as something is gained in devoting oneself to any kind of artistic expression. One spends more time in communication with unknown people at a distance and less time with those in one’s immediate life. Alexander needed his world of words to give his life a context within eternity but lost something of the immediacy and consolations of everyday living and love. Now, in his hour of most desperate need, as he stands on death’s threshold, Alexander is even prepared to buy more words if that will free him from his fear of what lies ahead.

Alexander also craves, however, that basic mainly nonverbal human contact and comfort that comes from personal interaction with those in one's immediate environment, and finds it in the form of the Albanian child. Alexander will rediscover one of the important meanings of life – to love and to care for those around us. Sometimes actions speak louder than words. There is a commonality in the circumstances of this odd pair. The boy is an exile from Albania while Alexander is an exile from sociability. He asks himself, “Why am I always a stranger in exile?” Like other introverts, Alexander has stood detached, in exile, from his own family and the simple social events of daily living.

A second partly related issue is the three segments of time: past, present, and future. This triad of temporal horsemen are represented symbolically in Eternity and a Day as three bicycle riders cloaked in yellow rain gear who ride through the film together periodically as well as by the trio of musicians that show up on the final bus ride. Time’s three segments ride and play together. The past accompanies the present in several respects. For people, one obvious sense in which the past is ever present is through our memories. As we move through life, we carry the accumulated memories of our experience. More broadly, however, every physical object stores information about the past. A house can be viewed as a memory of the collective work of the carpenters and other contractors that went into its construction, as well as the work of the lumberjacks who felled the trees from which each two-by-four was made and the breezes that blew the seeds that landed in various advantageous spots that allowed those trees to grow. Every present moment and object derives from the accumulation of the collective past.

One tactic by which Angelopoulos emphases this integrated conception of time is by eschewing flashbacks in favor of “memory trips.” During the scenes that include Alexander’s wife when she was living or his mother when she was young, we see Alexander not as a young man but at his current age. This is typically how memory functions. Our images of ourselves are continuously brought up to the present, but our memories of those we once knew remain frozen in time.

The past is carried forward into the present but, at the same time, the future is inherent in the present. Alexander once asked his young wife how long tomorrow lasts, to which she quite perceptively replied, “For an eternity and a day.” At one level, that answer is a play on words – the words that Alexander so dearly loves. One meaning of the word “tomorrow” is the day after today – which will be 24 hours long like every other day. Another meaning is “the future” – tomorrow in general – which lasts an eternity. Our births lead to our present days and our deaths are inherent in each one of those days, but time does not end with the death of any individual. The present simply advances to a point where one’s death is in the past instead of in the future, but the three riders of time were traveling together all along.

A third issue of this film is boundaries: boundaries that separate Greece from Albania, life from death, and memories from present time. One symbolic representation of the boundary issue is through images of people clinging to fences. We see it at the scene on the Albanian border where would-be emigrants cling in silhouette to the fence separating the political states and we see it in the wedding scene when three boys hang on a fence for a better view of the bride and groom (who are crossing the boundary from single status to marriage). How do we move across these borders? We move across geographic boundaries by walking or on vehicles. Hence the recurrent images of buses and ships. We move through life transitions by ceremonies: births, marriages, and funerals. It’s hard to show visually our passage through time but Angelopoulos hints at it during the final bus excursion. The bus passes the three riders of time. Later when the bus stops, the riders catch up, still traveling in tandem. Our position in time changes, but past, present, and future continue to ride along together. The issue of political boundaries was especially relevant at the time depicted in this film due to the Albanian refugee crisis.

Finally, this film is about how to deliver an exile – a searcher – back home. For the Albanian boy, home is a matter of geographical location. For Alexander, the journey home is his imminent appointment with death and the return of his corporeal manifestation to the cosmos. The theme of coming to terms with mortality is certainly not a novel one. It’s been touched on repeatedly by Bergman, in such films as Wild Strawberries (1957) and The Seventh Seal (1957) and by Kurasawa in Ikiru (1952).

Production Values: Angelopoulos is notorious for the languid, unhurried pace of his films. He lets scenes linger and develop in their own good time. The average length of his shots is far longer than for Hollywood films, some running to several minutes. During dialog, he does not cut back and forth between the speakers. His camera may move around the speakers a bit, catching them from different angles and perspectives, but without cutting between multiple camera positions. As a result, viewers get the feeling of eavesdropping on the conversations and activities rather than participating in them. The dialog is sparse in any case, as most of what is significant in the film is developed through mood and images. This is why Angelopoulos’s work is often referred to as visual poetry. Visually, the film is superlative.

The performance by Bruno Ganz as Alexander is the heart and soul of the film. Ganz spoke his dialog in German and his part was later dubbed into Greek but the dubbing is not noticeable because Ganz sports a dense beard that masks his lips and there is a relative paucity of dialog anyway. Ganz conveys his character mainly through his body language and facial expressions. Bruno Ganz is probably best known for his role in Wings of Desire (1987), but also appeared in The American Friend (1977), Nosferatu, the Vampire (1978), Circle of Deceit (1981), Strapless (1989), and The Last Days of Chez Nous (1993). Ganz acts as our spiritual guide for Eternity and a Day as he did in Wings of Desire.

Bottom-Line: There are several problems with this film, the foremost of which is pretentiousness. It touches on many profound issues but ends up having nothing very original or significant to say about any of them. No one issue is laid out clearly enough to create an “ah-ha” experience. Viewers have to wend their way through a lot of obscure symbolism and tedious philosophical mumbo jumbo only to discover that the message is not profound enough to warrant that kind of investment of time and energy. I rather enjoy difficult films – if there is a payoff at the end. This film also puts demands on the viewer’s attention span because of its slow pace and lack of action, but, again, I would put up with that for an adequate reward. There’s also little emotional resonance in the film. The relationship between Alexander and the Albanian boy is not really very moving or convincing, partly because the boy has little overt personality and lacks the adorable qualities that we usually associate with child actors and actresses. Finally, Angelopoulos’ use of symbolism is often either too trite or too obscure. Was it really necessary, for example, to have one of the bus stops named “All Souls’ Stop?” Eternity and a Day has its moments of impressive imagery but too often sinks into banal platitudes.

I recommend this film only for those with an established affinity for art films and even then, some of you in that category will find that his film tries your patience. If you’re into deeply philosophical films and visual poetry, this could be a four-star film for you, but for everyone else, I think three-stars is more appropriate. Eternity and a Day is in Greek with English subtitles and has a running time of 130 minutes.


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

Landscape in the Mist
Z


Recommended:
Yes

Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older