DENNIS HARVEY
Mother Nature rules the roost in three international Oscar submissions—and in experimental wonder ‘Last Things’
Work and its discontents take on a grimmer hue in Asimina Proedrou’s Behind the Haystacks, another Film Movement find that (like both titles above) was submitted by its primary country of origin to the Oscars’ Best International feature competition. Here, geography rather than agriculture is the key element, along with the ever-increasing pressures that “global economics” bear on the individual. Stergios (Stathis Stamoulakatos) is a middle-aged fisherman whose family has lived for generations on the Greek side of the Greece-Macedonia border.
In some senses, little has changed—certainly not the alternately fond and bullying way he treats his fretful, devout wife Maria (Eleni Ouzounidou) and their only child Anastasia (Evgenia Lavda), a trainee nurse. Yet somehow it all keeps getting more difficult, the struggle to escape debt drastically worsening when Stergios finds himself stuck with a punitive tax bill. Eventually he has no choice but to accept the offer of his despised brother-in-law (Paschalis Tsarouhas)—a man whose conscienceless flauntings of the law tend to profit himself while landing others in jail—to ferry illegal immigrants across a lake.
Haystacks begins with local children discovering two drowned bodies in the reeds just off-shore, so you can guess Stergios’ high-risk errand proves ill-fated. The complexly structured script is divided into three sections, providing a Rashomon-like array of perspectives on overlapping events. In the second, we see Maria’s awakening towards both the plight of foreign refugees in a nearby tent camp, and the illicit activities her husband hides from her. The third shows Anastasia, who at home acts the part of the submissive “good girl” (though not without complaints), having a considerably more independent, modern life whenever her conservative parents aren’t watching. Inevitably, these strands and others (mostly involving Dina Milhailidou as a neighbor and Christos Kontogeorgis as her son) will cross to results variously confrontational, melodramatic, and tragic.
While this kind of puzzle-like storytelling has its own fascination, Proedrou’s film already has such a crowded dramatic and thematic agenda, it might’ve been better served by a more straightforward chronological approach. The over-complicated path taken ends up creating a certain amount of confusion, without necessarily deepening our understanding of the characters or their problems. Still, this portrait of a traditional way of life getting battered and dismantled by external forces is compelling in its ambitions. It begins streaming on arthouse platform Film Movement Plus this Fri/26.