To thávma tis thálassas ton Sargassón
Syllas Tzoumerkas (2019)
Messolonghi, according to the website greeka.com, ‘is a beautiful small town located on the western side of Greece. Stretching around a mesmerizing sea lake dotted with tiny fishermen houses, Messolonghi oozes charm in abundance!’ According to Syllas Tzoumerkas, the writer-director of The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea, Messolonghi is a god-forsaken spot and, beneath its backwater surface, a hellhole of social dysfunction and emotional abuse. In the strongest scene, a drug-dealing, hopped-up club singer called Manolis (Hristos Passalis) rounds off his performance with some improvised lyrics: he insults Messolonghi and its citizens in a series of ripe expletives that don’t go down well with most of the audience. The next morning, Manolis’s corpse is found hanging from a tree overlooking the town’s beach and the ‘mesmerizing sea lake’.
Hardly less scathing than Manolis in his view of Messolonghi, Syllas Tzoumerkas had survived to introduce this screening at the London Film Festival (LFF). His film is nonetheless noteworthy as the latest addition to the Fargo league, movies which take in vain the name and/or rubbish the ethos of a real, smallish location. As with the Coens, Tzoumerkas’s target isn’t his home town: he’s from Thessaloniki. The undisguised specificity of place isn’t the only striking feature of The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea. It may be garbage but, if so, it’s flamboyant garbage. This was only the third of the twelve films I’ll be seeing at this year’s LFF but I’ll be surprised to see a more bizarre one[1].
In a prologue set in 2006, police detective Elisabeth (Angeliki Papoulia) is part of a team in Athens that raids the hideout of a group of alleged anarchist terrorists. She’s removed from the team after refusing to yield to quasi-blackmail pressure from her boss (Yorgos Tsemberopoulos) to make false statements relating to the young activists. The boss mentions there’s a vacancy for the chief of police in Messolonghi. Tzoumerkas takes up the story there ten years later. Single parent Elisabeth lives with her high-school student son Dimitris (Christian Culbida) and shares her bed with Vassilis (Argyris Xafis), a hospital doctor, who’s married to someone else. Elisabeth conspicuously resents wasting her time and career in the back of beyond. Her default gait is a stomp, her default manner of talking to colleagues a splenetic rant, and if looks could kill … Elisabeth is dressed to kill too. The weather’s hot but she favours tight black trousers and boots, and a shiny black jacket.
The first part of the film alternates scenes featuring, on the one hand, Elisabeth and, on the other, the contrasting Rita (Youla Boudali, who co-wrote the film with Tzoumerkas) – Manolis’s sister. Diffident, quietly spoken and unremarkable in appearance, she works in an eel farm and as a cleaner at a local Orthodox church. (Not unexpectedly, Tzoumerkas shows the eels being gutted at the factory. He also has a documentary about eels in the Sargasso Sea screening on a television in Elisabeth’s house.) In spite of their outward differences, both the main women characters are soon doing or seeing puzzling things. Elisabeth, after a routine night of sex with Vassilis and drowning her sorrows, is late arriving at work. When a woman complains about being kept waiting, Elisabeth slams the office door in her face. She then opens another door, into what’s evidently the changing area for the male cops, where she finds her colleagues Grigoris (Laertis Vassiliou) and Vangelis (Michalis Kimonas) in a state of undress. It’s unclear if they too are so late in they’ve not yet got their uniforms on; or if Tzoumerkas is just anxious to maintain the film’s nakedness level, already high in the opening scenes. Somewhat later, Rita takes a phone call to the eel farm that informs her of her brother’s death. Her initial, credible reaction is to moan, her next reaction more startling. She deliberately thumps her head against a work surface, passes out and is rushed to hospital. The dream she has there is even more baffling than what’s gone before.
In the church she cleans, Rita overhears a young priest (Thanos Tokakis) talking to a group of middle-aged-to-elderly women about New Testament stories, including the miracle of the raising of Jairus’s daughter. In Rita’s dream, this young priest rises from the sea and walks ashore. He’s embraced, with almost lustful enthusiasm, by an older man. Inside a house on the beach, a female form, which looks to have been dead for some time, sits up in bed. This figure presumably corresponds to Jairus’s daughter, the older man to her father and the priest to Christ. There are a couple of other girls who run about the beach theatrically: Jonathan Romney’s Screen Daily review of the film isn’t wrong in likening them to members of ‘a troupe from a travelling production of Hair’. Although the sequence is a prime example of the film’s intermittent incomprehensibility, it’s also the only obvious explanation of its title.
Several critics (including Peter Bradshaw, needless to say) have described the film as ‘Lynchian’. Predictably enough: it seems all a director needs to do to justify the epithet is set his story in a small town, reveal the underlying sex and violence, and throw in a few surreal bits. Tzoumerkas’s Messolonghi is a small world, all right. When Elisabeth and her son go to a dinner party hosted by her lover and his wife Faye (Alkistis Poulopoulou), the other guests include district attorney Andreas (Laertis Malkotsis) and his mute brother Michalis (Thanassis Dovris), whose smell astonishes Dimitris, unlucky enough to be seated next to him. (I missed why Michalis hadn’t washed for weeks.) The dark underbelly of the place is exposed chiefly in the form of orgies, thanks to video recordings that Elisabeth finds in Manolis’s home. Vassilis and Andreas take the lead in these outdoor revels. Rita, who is raped repeatedly, and Michalis are reluctant participants whose involvement Manolis appears to supervise. Another orgiast is Axel (Maria Filini), Rita’s colleague at the eel factory. She works too on a fast-food stand in the town square, where she’s eventually shot dead by Michalis, once he’s gone completely (as distinct from almost completely) crazy.
The Lynchian label for this film is unfair to David Lynch in various ways, not least because his work typically has an authentically funny side. The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea, though luridly eccentric, is humourless. And while Tzoumerkas is obviously aiming for more than a crime drama/thriller (though that’s how IMDb terms it), it’s irritating that the police procedural aspect is so sketchy. Investigating Manolis’s death, Elisabeth and her team don’t, for example, bother to make inquiries at the club where he performed. If they did, of course, they’d have scores of suspects, given what Manolis had to say about Messolonghi. It turns out Rita killed her brother then made it look like suicide – a process described in unpleasantly detailed flashback. As someone who thinks performers coercing audience participation deserve everything they get, I wondered, even in light of the orgies, if Rita’s motive was revenge on Manolis for dragging her up on stage. Maybe this was the last straw: all she tells Elisabeth is that ‘for years I did what he wanted’.
The quality of the acting in The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea is overshadowed by some of the extraordinary things the actors are required by the director to do (Peter Greenaway syndrome). Even so, it’s worth commenting briefly on the performances of Angeliki Papoulia, Youla Boudali and Hristos Passalis. I wrongly thought I’d not seen Boudali before but her acting credits include Fatih Akin’s In the Fade (2017), though I assume her role (as a receptionist) was a small one. As Rita, she’s required, for the most part, to be mutely melancholy and she does this very well. Angeliki Pappoulia and Hristos Passalis played sister and brother in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth (2009)[2]. Since then, Pappoulia has featured in two more Lanthimos films, Alps (2011) and The Lobster (2015), as well as in Tzoumerkas’s A Blast (2014). The fault may well be the director’s but I was bored by Pappoulia’s monotonously strident playing of Elisabeth. As in Dogtooth, Hristos Passalis is the most interesting member of the cast. He has much less screen time here but he’s feverishly, dynamically seedy in Manolis’s club routine. You miss him when he’s gone.
In the Athens prologue, as the police prepare to storm the anarchist cell, most of the cell’s members are engaged in sexual rather than political activity. The orgiasts in Messolonghi are much too old to be the same people a decade on; the two groups’ shared appetite for vigorous copulation is difficult to ignore. One of the young suspected terrorists taken in for questioning is badly beaten up; in the interview room, tough-as-nails Elisabeth makes fun of his bruised and bloody face. In the closing stages, once the crowd in the town square has reacted to his killing of Axel, Michalis appears at the police station with his face in much the same state. Elisabeth was exiled to Messolonghi after refusing to yield to blackmail. At the end of the film, thanks to being in a position to blackmail local bigwigs like Andreas, she’s heading back to Athens.
What to make of these rhymes? If Tzoumerkas meant to build a picture of widespread corruption, lack of personal integrity, propensity to violence and so on, he’d have done better not to obscure the issue with weird distractions. He certainly creates in Elisabeth a police officer whose interpretation of the rule of law is, to put it mildly, distinctive – but this seems to reflect an unlovely personality rather than the system she’s part of. She treats nearly everyone appallingly – and does so from the outset, in that interview with the young anarchist. So her behaviour can’t just be the fault of being stuck in Messolonghi. Driving round the area, she has a male officer as her chauffeur, usually the young and conscientious Vangelis. On one occasion, the seemingly decent but less handsome Grigoris is preparing to drive her instead. Elisabeth yells that she doesn’t want him in the car because he stinks. The men in this film do not score high marks for personal hygiene.
After watching the orgy tape, Elisabeth marches round to Vassilis’s house and beats him up, in front of his doubly deceived wife. Is her violent reaction because of what Vassilis and others do in the orgies, or because Elisabeth feels her lover has deceived her? The answer should be the former, even though it’s hard to tell when Elisabeth is such an aggressively nasty piece of work – and Rita is the one person, with the (qualified) exception of her own son, to whom Elisabeth shows some kindness. When she discovers how Manolis really died, Elisabeth doesn’t arrest Rita. Instead, she hands her a stash of Manolis’s drug-dealing money, which Elisabeth discovered in his home. The last we see of Rita, she’s on board a plane, on her way to a new start. The last we see of Elisabeth, she and Dimitris are leaving their house in Messolonghi, Athens-bound. We don’t find out if Vangelis, who just wants to pass his police exams and get a transfer, succeeds and heads off too. The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea, my foot. This film should have been called ‘Escape from Messolonghi’.
4 October 2019
[1] Afternote: … and I didn’t.
[2] In which she was credited as Aggeliki Papoulia and I thought he was Christos Passalis (though there’s no ‘C’ in his name in the IMDb cast listing.)
