User Reviews

In the new Aris Kaplanidis film we once again notice what seems to be eating him and aesthetically fueling his past efforts: His search for, let's say, a "cinematic balance". From his geometrical direction that clashes with the chaos of his most recent video-clip "E, OXI" by Tri.P.A. Kroo (a hip-hop trio band he's a part of), to the battle between the "claustrophobic" shots and the "liberating" aural band, the short film "Air Co." (2010), traversing through a wondrous drift between austere cinematic documentation, bared performances and intense nostalgia through the use of traditional Greek music in "Pisogyrismata (Same Old Blues)" (2010 – Audience's Award at the Drama International Short Film Festival), the young Greek director would, through relentless experimentation based on the "co-operation" of certain cinematic tools, progressively achieve a personal style. In the film "I Dreamed of Afrodites", I'm of the opinion that this research of his has reached an enviable level, if only because nothing is specific while, at the same time, everything seems so well "constructed". First off, the story. One could say it's the story of a couple that is unable to communicate over the course of one night, resulting in a "tragic finale that induces laughter". One could also say, however, that it's a story we see and –mostly- hear from the man's point of view. Since he can't fully comprehend what's going on around him, so do we, the viewers, find ourselves unable to comprehend what exactly is going on. The movie's narration appears to be ambiguous and pleasantly problematic. Next up, the performances. The two stars and writers of the film, Constantina Georganta and Elias Roumeliotis, play characters who take up the same space at the same time, as well as indifferent creatures who sometimes look more like ghosts than tangible entities. They touch without being felt, they speak without being heard, they look without comprehending. It's as if something happens between their movements around the room and their expressions that never quite allows an actual happening to manifest. Their dialog seem to be, cinematically speaking, "deaf", where nobody deals with what they just heard, preferring to spout a monologue instead of giving a proper answer. Finally, the sound-image collaboration. Even though the story is linear, without notable gaps, overbearing editing or complicated narrative structure, the use of sound and sometimes over-stylized photography shatter any illusion of realism, allowing us to enjoy the actor's intoxicating voice-over and the Douglas Sirk-like lit actress by Kaplanidis' regular collaborator, the talented Nikos Papaevangeliou, leading us to abandon story comprehension in favor of the dream-like cinematic enjoyment. In fact, everything that transpires ranges from provocative farce to dramatic emotionality, following this calculate abrasiveness of the collaboration between image and sound: when we're about to hear something, it stops abruptly, gets muzzled, or mutated, transforming the aural band into a vehicle of doubt, that penetrates and destroys any realistic consolidation. The film, having one leg on "certainty" of a calculated construction and the other looking for solid ground between denial of realistic conventions and the charm of cinematic "saturation", thus balances itself wonderfully, proving that some cinematic endeavors, in order to have an identity and consequently a reason to exist, must first deny it.