Of the three Theo Angelopoulos films that I have watched, currently available on American DVDs, all have been truly great films. 1988’s Landscape In The Mist is a terrific tale of two children on an unattainable quest; 1998’s Eternity And A Day is a great film dealing with the complexities of imminent death; but, having just watched his most recently completed film, 2004’s Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow (Trilogia I: To Livadi Pou Dakryzei), I can honestly say, "There’s great, and then there’s Great!"
As excellent as the first two films are, this film is superior in almost all ways — from the camera movements and screen compositions, to the acting and character development, to the most basic elements of the picaresque story. Fortunately, many European critics agreed, and it won the 2004 European Film Academy Critics Award.
In some ways, this film takes the best parts of the work of Federico Fellini, Terrence Malick, and Michelangelo Antonioni, and stews them until they melt into a work only Angelopoulos could make.
However, what separates Angelopolous films from most other films by even some great filmmakers are his screenplays. This film was written by him, longtime Fellini collaborator Tonino Guerra, Petros Markaris, and Giorgio Silvagni, and even though, like the other films of his I’ve seen, this one is spare in dialogue, the story coheres because of the way the scenes are written to allow the actors’ expressions to convey what words need not. And, like Yasujiro Ozu, Angelopoulos is a master of ellipses, never fully explaining certain things in a film, nor deliberately not showing the viewer things that would be standard in a more linear film.
A good example of this is when the orphan girl, Eleni (Alexandra Aidini), who Spyros and Danae (Thalia Argyriou) take in as a foster child, gets pregnant; in a scene that shows her as a teen, she is sent away for months to give birth to twin boys, and then brought home. Yet, we never know who the real father is — the old man Spyros (Vassilis Kolovos), or his unnamed son (played by Nikos Poursanidis, a good looking version of Jim Carrey, who is unnamed in the film — at least the American version, although is referenced as Alexis in many reviews).
Similarly, after Danae dies, we see Eleni run away with the son, and hitch a ride with the musicians hired to play at the wedding. The adventures they have with the musicians makes a good portion of this film reminiscent of Angelopoulos’s own The Traveling Players, Fellini’s Variety Lights, and Ozu’s Floating Weeds. It is not until later in the film that we learn she actually did marry the old man, when he comes to take her back and soliloquies on a theater stage. Or, at least, that's what the old man claims.
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