The hero of Eternity and a Day, Angelopoulos' latest inquest into Greek history, national identity, and the tragic inevitability of borders is, in fact, a poet who's obsessed with words, even trapped by them. Early on he walks by the sea and complains of the silence, yet the soundtrack is constantly alive with the gentle slur of the surf and the slow, soothing roar of automobiles, not to mention the music of Eleni Karaindrou (long-lined and elegiac, this is one of those soundtracks the movie's characters can hear as clearly as we do). Given a death sentence by his doctor, told to check into the hospital "when the pain becomes too great," this writer, Alexandre (Bruno Ganz), has finally decided the pain of living has become too much. Rereading some letters from his late wife Anna (Isabelle Renauld), he decides to take one last visit to their old seaside home.
At first it's to be just him and his dog, but journeys inevitably make for new acquaintances. A police raid on street urchins washing windshields prompts Alexandre to let one boy (Achilleas Skevis) into his car for a getaway. Later he spots the same youth being abducted into what turns out to be a child-smuggling ring, and rescues him again. The boy is young, blond, as sad-faced as Alexandre himself, and an illegal alien from over the mountains in Albania. He gives the boy food and money, but they finally bond when Alexandre hears from him a new word, one that means "little flower."
All this time Alexandre is voyaging to his own past as well, recalling a beautiful sea outing with his wife and family. While they enjoyed the sun he stayed locked in his own head, and only now, from this late perspective, can he see the cruelty of that. He voyages to an idealized past as well, telling the boy the story of a 19th-century poet who went back to his ancestral homeland, a Greek fighting for independence. The poet wants to write an epic for his people, but in a language he doesn't know, so buys words off the villagers.
It all sounds vaguely sappy, I know--though the poet's list of bought words starts off with "abyss"--and truth be told, a few (very few) scenes seem to be from some generic feel-good movie. Except Angelopoulos is not one to stay light-hearted about anything for very long, and he's never light-headed. His show-stopping moments--those long, long crane shots that capture and let you see so much you start to ache--are in full force. There's a wedding dance as quiet and lovely as a dream, and the outing with Anna is a radiant memory. But mostly feelings of terror and loss dominate: At the children's black market, where richly dressed prospective parents wander a gutted basement and inspect the kids in line-ups; at the snowy Albanian border, where figures hang like meat on a chain-link fence and one guard approaches with the sinister cape and molasses tread of a movie vampire; at the funeral for one of the boy's friends, held in a building still under construction, as solemn as an ancient ritual; at an intersection Alexandre can't seem to cross, so other drivers tap their horns once lightly then politely drive around.
There is at least one major miscalculation, a would-be climax on a bus which rather clumsily drags in symbols for politics, culture, love, and language. It's too obvious, and falls flat; but the fact that Angelopoulos does set it on a bus is a key to his greatness. The obvious comparison he always gets is to Tarkovsky, and there are considerable similarities, but Tarkovsky was so attuned to the mystic and the mythic that his films could feel inhuman. Angelopoulos, for all his gravity and serious-mindedness, has always relished the drab and the everyday as much as the extraordinary. Always planted in the middle of those extended takes that sweep over centuries and continents, like signposts guiding the way, are shopkeepers and sandwich vendors and bar patrons who do their job with a pleasant disposition and help out if they can. "Tarkovskian" connotes talent so fearsome it deserves no less--and maybe no more--than the highest respect; but "Angelopollonian"? That I can love.
