Beware of Greeks Bearing Guns
Directed by John Tatoulis.
Starring Lakis Lazopoulos, Zoe Carides and John Bluthal.
I’ve been waiting with bated breath for this film since I first heard of it a year ago. A Greek black comedy! Show me good-natured interfering histrionics, the black-clad yiayias reeking with contempt, the hen-pecked priests, and the young men who think they’re Apollo, and I’ll laugh until there are tears in my eyes, give me “Untie my hands, I want to talk” and I’ll roll around the aisle. (No, really, I like Greece.)
Unfortunately, it’s not black comedy or even romantic comedy but farce, combined, surprisingly enough, with the sentimental theme of reunited-middle- aged lovers plus teen identity crisis. The result is disjointed, overplayed and immensely disappointing. Whose bright idea was it to ask Molière to do a version of Looking for Alibrandi? No, if it was Molière it would have been funny.
The plot, as far as it goes, is that a Cretan woman, Maria Poulakis, is obsessed with killing Vasilli Philipakis for the murder of her husband in 1943. 59 years later, Vasilli is found in Melbourne and Maria sends her eldest grandson Manos to exact revenge. Unfortunately, Manos (Lazapoulos) is a mild- mannered schoolteacher who doesn’t think he’s capable of murder. His younger twin brother George (also Lazapoulos), a loudmouth deadbeat, agrees and joins the vendetta party uninvited. In Melbourne are also Manos’ former sweetheart Nicki (Carides) and her fatherless daughter Katerina. Guess what happens there.
The humour is obvious, laboured and pointless, particularly the Manos-George mistaken identity scenes. Well-drawn characters might have saved it but Manos is the only convincing one; George is straight out of a stand-up comic routine and the rest are cardboard. This is why it degenerates into painful sentimentality. It’s one of those films that is predicated on the belief that its characters are intrinsically likable and its situations are intrinsically funny. Neither is true. This film is the biggest mistake since Menelaus invited Paris to “come and meet the wife”.
Guy
