Only the sound of water and a giggle can be heard. Then, in the luscious blue sea, beneath the scorching Greek sun emerge the bodies of a young man and a teenage woman playfully moving around one another. They latch on to one another and hug. Her expression suggests that out here, in the sea, away from family and friends, or the generic “world”, they can lose themselves in their own little bubble. Unbeknownst to us, their movements, the distance and closeness in this short sequence communicates the essence of the next 95-minutes.
Teenager Eleftheria (Angeliki Beveratou) has left the family home in northern Greece and has come to stay with and help her older, pregnant sister. Eleftheria is not used to the oppressive heat of the south, nor is her sister. When she meets the beguiling next door neighbour Angelos (Nikos Zeginoglou), who is studying to be a doctor, she is immediately drawn to him. Her attraction and sexual awakening is fuelled by the sounds of a woman’s sexual pleasure from the apartment above that Eleftheria listens to at night, feeding her own sexual curiosity.
Her attraction to Angelos is quietly reciprocated. They spend time together, sitting in his air conditioned apartment talking or venturing around the city on the back of his motorbike.
Christina Loakeimidi’s sophomore feature is inseparable from her debut feature, Harisma (2010) – both are about women embracing their vulnerability, albeit in different contexts. Whereas Eleftheria is a young woman looking outward for a way to consummate her sexual awakening, Loakeimidi’s earlier protagonist, Ismini (Vasso Kavalieratou) emotionally withdraws herself. In each story, there’s an encounter with a man that either triggers or escalates the drama, but Eleftheria and Ismini are characters at different places in their lives. One is receptive to emotional and physical vulnerability while the other needs encouragement.
Medium brings Loakeimidi one film away from a thematic trilogy, if she chooses to go down this route. One might have expected Medium to be her feature debut, with Harisma adding to Eleftheria’s tale of sexual awakening. In some ways they feel back-to-front, or maybe it’s simply that Ismini’s defensive posturing has the slight sensibility of being a latter part of the thematic conversation Loakeimidi is engaging in.
Early on, we sense Eleftheria is a character waiting for a spark to bring her to life. With the heat and being in an unfamiliar city, whether or not she knows it or Loakeimidi is willing to admit it, Eleftheria is suffocating. She’s at a point in her life’s journey where she’s caught in that awkward place between adolescence and adulthood – she’s ready for a metamorphosis. Loakeimidi’s film might be centred around the adolescent female’s experience, but it also speaks to a universal and non-gender specific experience.
The revelations in Eleftheria and Angelos non-defined relationship challenges the puritan notions around the consummation of either one’s sexual awakening or sexuality. In Medium, it’s perceived as a moment and not something we’re forever tethered to. The characters have to come to realise this, but when a friend tells Eleftheria that she will love many more times, Loakeimidi is nudging her audience to be practical about matters of the heart.
In the end, Medium is a journey to understand that we can offer someone an experience or something they need in a chapter of their life. From the opening scene, the labour or struggle is that the conflicting emotions of desire versus compassion and even sense of responsibility towards someone complicates matters. Loakeimidi understands this pragmatism isn’t easy, and her characters must unpack all of their emotional baggage to find a path through.
Medium is a gentle film that instead of dramatising its character’s day-to-day life, appreciates a quiet observational style. Cinema frequently tries to accelerate the pace of life, its experiences and rites of passage, replacing the monotony with drama. In Loakeimidi’s hands, the essence of everyday life is kept intact as much as possible, allowing us to feel the monotony, the slow and undulating path our emotional experiences take us. That’s not to say there’s a lack of drama, because Loakeimidi fills Eleftheria’s world with energy – from her encounter with Anna (Martha Fritzila), a medium, to her sister’s friend who runs a hotel and rents rooms for a few hours to desperate lovers.
Loakeimidi’s skill, however, is that she trusts she has done enough to express the emotions, desires and thoughts of her characters. In these moments, she steps back to let them silently fill the frame and to allow the audience to quietly reflect. In so doing, a communication begins that builds a conversation out of the film’s themes and ideas.
Medium is a quietly impressive film and perhaps one of its final revelations is how in the hands of a director, time becomes like putty, that can be moulded and manipulated. In the end, Loakeimidi is playing with the idea that a film is closer to a memory or a daydream, from which we must awaken.
Medium shows online for free throughout the entire month of December as part of ArteKino 2024.
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