Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow (2004) Movie Review, Cast & Crew, Film Summary

Film by Palmes D’Or winner Theo Angelopoulos. Angelopoulos is the art-film director your mother warned you about – his works are regularly four hours long, have little story, have twenty-minute-long scenes of people wandering about the landscape and then disorientating time jumps when you find half of the people in the last shot are now dead, and demand a working knowledge of eighty-year-old Greek history. The Weeping Meadow is in largely the same style at his great The Travelling Players, featuring a tapestry-like telling of ordinary people being fucked over by history. Some directors who may owe something to him, or at least claim kinship, include Hsiao-hsien Hou, Michael Cimino, and Gus Van Sant. The Weeping Meadow is a sad, slow, tragic work spiked with moments of joy, concluding on a note of total devastation. It tells the story of a young man and his girl, Eleni, who are thrown together as children and grow up to be lovers, despite the fact that his father, her adopted father, has forced her to marry him; they run off and live in abandoned buildings in Thessaloniki, are adopted by rambling Rembetika musicians, and eventually lose everything as Fascism and war come to Greece. Angelopoulos channels the mood and sensibility of folk myth with uncommon fidelity. It’s not as vivid and dramatic as The Travelling Players, but an hypnotic and haunting experience all the same.