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Wednesday, Jun 20, 1990
Voyage to Cythera
Introduced by Yvette Biro (Taxidi sta Kithira). Voyage to Cythera tells of an aged partisan from the Greek Civil War who returns after years of exile in the Soviet Union to bedevil his son, a stage director in Athens, and his long-deserted wife. Shot with the kind of moody exactness characteristic of cinematographer Arvanitis, in the rain-drenched mountain regions, in Athens and on the stormy quay at Piraeus, the film is as much a dream journey as a real one, as much myth as contemporary drama. (The island of the film's title is the last stop for many elderly Greeks who go there to live on their pensions.) Of course the contemporaneity of historical and modern times is a constant element of Angelopoulos' style; in Voyage to Cythera, he implies that for many Greeks-certainly for the elderly people in this mountain village-time stopped with the tragedy of the Civil War, a wound that refuses healing. But for most, life goes on with all its compromises. To find the Greece he knew and had fought for, the old man must go elsewhere-back to the USSR, or into his fantasies. The fine stage actor, the late Manos Katrakis, gave an extraordinary last performance as the eccentric old revolutionary on a mystical odyssey home.
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