Greek passion

Harvey Keitel meets Ulysses' Gaze

by Peter Keough

Written and directed by Theo Angelopoulos. With Harvey Keitel, Maïa Morgenstern, and Erland Josephson. Opens Friday at the Cable Car Cinema.

One of the victims of the Holocaust, it's been suggested, was art; when Beethoven can be played within the gates of Auschwitz, the validity of aesthetics grows doubtful. Neither have matters improved in the decades since, with overlapping massacres making the end of the century as the age of genocide. Yet one of the great if unhailed artists of the world, the Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos, is unwilling to concede the impulse to beauty to the powers of death.

In his staggering, if sometimes unwieldy, masterpiece Ulysses' Gaze, Angelopoulos wagers that three cans of undeveloped film can make sense of the Bosnian inferno. The oldest film footage shot in the Balkans, these reels are lost somewhere in the smoke and blood of shifting borders, internecine warfare, and ethnic cleansing that is the region's recent and past history. To find them, to restore the innocence of this "first gaze," Angelopoulos suggests, might vindicate the art of film, make sense of carnage that defies it, and redeem the soul of whoever finds it.

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Epic adventure

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The odds of his succeeding in this aim seem slim, but it helps that the seeker is Harvey Keitel, who in the likes of Bad Lieutenant and The Piano has explored more than any other actor extremes of human anguish, transgression, and salvation. He's A., unsurprisingly a Greek filmmaker. Ulysses's story ends with a homecoming; A.'s story begins with one -- his return to his home village after 35 years of self-imposed exile in the United States.

In a surreal sequence that combines The Umbrellas of Cherbourg with Cinema Paradiso by way of Magritte, an outdoor showing of one of A.'s films in the village's rainy square is interrupted by demonstrations for and against him by progressive and reactionary forces. They meet in opposed ranks of those bearing umbrellas and those carrying torches, separated by riot police. Between the two groups, blind to the danger, passes a solitary woman (Maïa Morgenstern) from A.'s past. Inspired perhaps by this manifestation of unresolved longing as well as by the glimpse of regional conflict his film has incited, A. accepts a commission from the Athens Film Archive to hunt down the missing cans.

What's inside is a lost work by the two Manakia brothers, pioneering moviemakers who recorded Greek life and culture before the upheaval of World War I. As A. traces their film through Albania to Bulgaria, Romania, and then Belgrade and Sarajevo, his past merges with theirs. He slides murkily into the identity of one of the brothers, who's arrested by Bulgarian authorities as a spy and threatened with execution before being rescued by a widow who looks remarkably like the woman from A.'s past. A few scenes later, he revisits his family as a child at the end of World War II and attends a perpetual New Year's party that lasts from the closing of the Nazi concentration camps to the imposition of Communism three years later. Haunting these memories and A.'s present wanderings are incarnations of the same woman, played by the Klimtian, androgynous Morgenstern, a Penelope weaving together the threads of the intertwined pasts and the uncertain present into an ominous, apocalyptic future.

As the title suggests, Ulysses' Gaze is ambitious, even overweening in its ambitions, striving to fuse the convulsive nightmare of contemporary history with a critique of the medium and rooting it in one of the fundamental stories of Western literature. At times it gets portentous, even silly -- Angelopoulos's dialogue ranges from sublimely poetic to clumsily pretentious.

Much more consistent is his gift for visual images. A monochromatic flashback is made to the death of one of the Manakia brothers as he films a ship passing in a harbor. A spectral blue, the sailing vessel touches the outer edge of the frame and the filmmaker collapses, even as the surviving world blooms into color. In another sequence A. hitches a ride on a barge bearing the dismembered remains of a towering statue of Lenin. Dwarfed by the remains of this absurd but still threatening Marxist cyclops, he passes undisturbed to his next destination, identified to the authorities, as was his Homeric prototype, as "Nobody."

Matching the confidence and purity of Angelopoulos's imagery is Keitel's performance. His Everyman is achingly particular, every pain and terror mirrored on a face harrowed by delusion and hope. Occasionally he lapses into the primal howl that was his trademark in Bad Lieutenant, but for the most part his passion and his intensity shimmer with authenticity. In the film's shattering conclusion, in the shattered rathole of a bombed-out movie theater in Sarajevo, A.'s journey ends and begins, his art vindicated and the sacrifice necessary for its victory made tragically clear. Angelopoulos's Gaze may or may not be triumphant, but it is unflinching.

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Epic adventure

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