The 1998 film by Greek director Theo Angelopoulos, Eternity And A Day (Mia Aioniotita Kai Mia Mera or Μια αιωνιότητα και μια μέρα), is not merely another film about a supposed poet wherein the art of poetry and the act of poesizing are never on display.
Yes, it’s true that, technically, neither are on screen, but it is a superior film about a supposed poet wherein the art of poetry and the act of poesizing are never on display, for the film does capture the dead cliché of ‘a soul of a poet’ as well as just about any I’ve ever seen. It does it with imagery, and Angelopoulos’s patented long takes, but it does capture it, and exceedingly well. The film was not only directed by Angelopoulos, but he wrote the screenplay. That it won that year’s Cannes Film Festival’s coveted Palm D’Or shows that, sometimes, quality still counts.
The tale subtly weaves the past, present, and future tenses of a dying man, the bearded poet Alexander (Bruno Ganz, best known for starring in Wim Wenders’ Wings Of Desire, and the later Adolf Hitler biopic Downfall, as Hitler), as he muses on life a day before he is to enter a hospital for an unspecified ‘test.’
In this manner, the film is in the fine tradition of films on dying men trying top come to grips with their lives, such as Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru, and Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. Yet, where the former film achieves its aims by balancing out the life of the dying man with that of a young woman, then turns the film on its head by dealing with the legacy of the man after his death, and the latter film evokes dread by displaying the subconscious memories of its lead character, Eternity And A Day splits the difference.
It does so as Alexander, after leaving his seaside apartment in Thessaloniki, after learning he has a terminal illness and must enter a hospital the next day, muses on a neighbor across the way who mirrors his taste in music, befriends a young unnamed immigrant Albanian boy (Achilleas Skevis) who is being exploited, and slips in and out of his and others’ pasts by simply walking into them. Angelopoulos does not cut to the past. His characters’ pasts are extensions of their presents.
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