Reviews

This is a very well structured first episode, with many interesting takes and some commendable acting. Unfortunately, the research work must have been done by people with very little acquaintance with Romanian culture. "Elina" is not an usual name in Romanian, and the Cyrillic alphabet is not in use in Romania and has not been for the past 160 years. The whole investigation starts off by means of the girl's leg plate, and yet it would have made absolutely no sense for it to have had Cyrillic writing on it. Except if she were actually coming from Moldova instead of Romania, but that's probably too much subtlety for the show's research team.

If there is any one character that this movie really pushes one to identify with, it must be Spyros. The dying man is there for the ride, and so are we, the ones unfortunate enough to have sat throughout this static disjointed mess. Tsangari manages to pull a sick joke on viewers by pretending that this movie is about "sex, death and life in between". This movie is a preposterously pretentious collage of thoroughly insipid scenes, fit for a post-lobotomy day-long blank staring session. I found the movie utterly unenjoyable, and its parallel to real-life documentaries revolting and absurd, seeing as how Attenborough manages to be a lot closer to his animals than this confounded director ever was to her actors. Tsangari is so adept at chasing the last traces of sincere expression out of the actors' performances that I feel like there was more humanity and life in the few shots of gorillas than there was from the entire cast of this excruciatingly dry film. The only memorable thing about this movie is how many yawns one could squeeze into 90 minutes. If you want a good (and recent) piece of Greek cinema, try Kynodontas (incidentally, Tsangari was an associate producer of that film, but hew role was probably small enough not to ruin what is a masterpiece of modern Greek cinema, unlike this unpalatable bunk).

The trouble with this is that it takes itself too seriously, it's supposed to be a clever film about the meaning of life on Earth (which makes it look sometimes as though it were just a kitsch introduction for other species wanting to have a broad overview of our planet in 90 minutes)but all that transpires is a metonymical lament on the perils of modern civilization and its lack of spirituality. The usual cries of 'war' and 'corruption and destruction of the environment' and 'loss of human dignity' are offered an only salvation in spirituality and religion. But the film attempts to present all religions as valid and holders of a truth, and melodramatically at that. Shots of New York busy streets and chickens down a conveyor belt are SUPPOSED to make me forget that life can be more than just barefoot dancing in front of earthen huts with no electricity, no vaccination, no dental care...

It's always hypocrites that say 'oh this is so bad the way we're living' but then fail to go off to Siberia or the Amazon or the Sahara and live there, if they really want to get away from it all..

It's an intellectually poor film with several muddled ideas about the meaning of life that has, nonetheless, some good moments for which you have to see it at least once. It's OK so long as it doesn't actually move you in any way, it shouldn't make you think because it comes with NOTHING.Nothing new.