O Thiasos

Saw O Thiasos, a war film. It follows a troupe of traveling actors and musicians in Greece from 1939 to sometime in the late 40s. Things get rough. The most central character seems to be a woman whose mother and father are the leads of the group. She develops an intense hatred for one of the other actors after her mother cheats on her father with him. He rats the father out to the secret police, she rats him out to the rebels. We watch her turn from innocent naif to a hardened politico. Eventually, it starts to feel too pointless to her to continue to care this passionately and she starts up the troupe again.

This film is founded on the principal that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Dues are payed to the ravages of war of course. Several of the actors suffer greatly (or just die.) One becomes a raving, half-mad Marxist. Another recounts how he was broken, body and soul, in the POW camps. This suffering, we feel, cannot be meaningless, but over and over the film repeats the image of a sound-truck blaring slogans to re-elect Papagos (and later Papandreou.) The fascists, the communists, and the British occupation all surge back and forth, at one point literally claiming and reclaiming a street, seemingly only differentiated by the uniforms of their thugs.

I don't know why the film chose actors as our avatars. There's something interesting and meta-level going on here certainly. At two points the actors directly address the camera. The film opens with one of the actors introducing a play (in my innocence, I hoped this would be a lighthearted paean to show-business.) One of the actor-assassinations takes place on stage and the audience applauds, thinking it part of the show. The central woman is often an uninvolved spectator, present for no clear reason. Perhaps we are meant to understand that the actors, as stage-people, are allowed to pass behind the curtain (so to speak.) They only preform one play over and over (though we never see them get all the way through it) but this meshes with the cyclic nature of history that the film presents. The play is perhaps meant to be their culture as the old guard dies and is replaced by fresh youths.

An interesting film, but I must warn you it's 4 hours long. Tough to get through in one sitting, I wish I'd had someone to watch it with and to bounce ideas off of. Also, I'm getting sick of WW2 and Nazis. I fear for the sake of my poor patience if many more Nazi-films are in the pipeline.