(Ed. Note: This was originally published at Image Facts.)
The Weeping Meadow, the first installment in a planned trilogy narrating the fortunes of Greece in the 20th century, is an odd sort of history. More operatic than descriptive, more transcendental poesis than mere reportage, and more steeped in vision than memory, it is legitimately Homeric in scope. Languid flickers of an edit mark solemn passages of time, these gaps effortlessly bridged by the consistently stylized formalism of Angelopoulos’ dreamscape Greece. Though time skips boldly across the surface of the film, Angelopoulos creatively turns its ensuing ripples into a visual rhythm, a cadence harmonized by the persistent themes of a phantom folk band always in the background.
Right from the very start, The Weeping Meadow is both history and incredulous metaphor wrought in long gazes of the lens. It is 1919, and a hieratically rag-tag mob of displaced Greeks strolls resolutely towards the lens, coming to a slow stop before a reflective sheet of water. They stand together as their recent history is reported, a token orphan in the crowd a symbol of the horrors left behind in Odessa. The next time we see this young orphan, Eleni, she is returning home after having spent the necessary months abroad to secretly give birth to illegitimate twins. Another cut and we are watching her flee an arranged marriage to her aging step-father, aided by her beloved Alexi, son of her adopted parents. The film begins to dig more deeply into the 20th century as Eleni and Alexi leave home to make their way in the big city on the edge of a continent about to go to war.
Angelopoulos abandons an overriding intimacy in the film, preferring simply to use his characters as the human element necessary to spark life in his inanimately crafted scenes. We aren’t afforded much emotional access to Eleni and Alexi, inasmuch as they mostly serve to lend us a vested interest in Angelopoulos’ otherwise beautifully sterile backdrops. The film is built more on a stock of memorable images than it is a bank of memorable moments. A fleet of oar-drawn boats flutters starkly across the screen, sheep hang from high in the branches of a leafless tree, a thousand pristine white sheets hang billowing on the beach. In one crowning moment, Alexi grabs a thread end from the crimson wool sweater Eleni has knitted him for his solo journey to America in search of fortune. He holds it as his boat drifts from the dock; it tightens and bends in the breeze as the sweater unravels until it snaps across the screen and the sequence collapses in a forlorn heap. I am sure that some sort of dialogue could have been scripted that told us all about how sad it was for this young family to be broken up, and how they may never see each other again. This could even have been accomplished in the same amount of time as it takes to watch a sweater unravel. But the direct simplicity with which Angelopoulos choreographs the finality of Alexi’s departure is much more potent.
This characteristic distance in Angelopoulos work makes the final act of The Weeping Meadow all the more surprising. Freed from prison, and stripped of her family by war, Eleni collapses in grief. No longer just a complimentary set piece to the rest of the film, she lies weeping with abandon at the edges of scenes. A fitting end to such a magnificently awful film.