QUICK’N DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN
The story opens with sounds unaccompanied by images and divorced from their context. There is a woman’s orgasmic moaning, and a throbbing vibration – the latter sourced from an actual vibrator, which will later come to play a prominent part in the film. For now though, this is a world reduced to its sound – those vibrations travel across space and leave echoes through time. This film, like the universe itself, begins with a Big Bang that reverberates in everything that follows.
Protagonist Sofia (Angeliki Papoulia) has a special interest in sound, and its embeddedness in the through-line of history. More particularly she has a bizarre theory that she pursues with a determination that is perhaps more monomaniacal than megalomaniacal: that the clay which was spun to create ancient amphorae was able, like a vinyl record, to encode ambient sounds, and if played back correctly, would allow us to eavesdrop into the past. It might even enable us to hear a background bell, or a snatch of everyday conversation, or an orgasm, or even, as Sofia dreams, the Cynic Diogenes’ actual laughter.
To test this theory, Sofia arms herself with a vibrator and a taser – both gifts from her boyfriend Petros (Christos Passalis) – and goes to stay with the talented but ill-reputed Potter (Jan Bijvoet), an actual potter living on the Greek coast who is capable of making amphorae the old-fashioned way on a foot-operated spinning wheel, and then firing them in a wood-fuelled kiln. As Potter prepares pots, Sofia tries to encode sounds into them. During this process, a strange, hostile relationship builds between artist and recordist, like the friction between a rough material surface and a stylus. Sofia is eccentric, insistent and erotically charged, while Potter is a genuine megalomaniac and, in his own words, a “monster”, whose aggression, cruelty and hubris make it near impossible for anyone – including the viewer – to spend much time in his presence.
This is part of the problem with Stathoulopoulos’ film. While it is full of genuinely interesting ideas about the intersection of art and ordinary lives in our everyday objects, and about the way that we all come from and return to dust, the film is just too protracted and overambitious. The movie is made up of long sequences (in four formal, extravagantly titled chapters), and the characters range between intolerably twee or downright annoying. Text at the beginning which refers to the real “local legal context” informing certain aspects of the film never really pays off, because those sections of the film (about monastic vetoes on women) are only tangentially relevant to the central drama. The quirky humour does not always land. In fact, it often requires disinterment.
The Megalomaniacs looks beautiful, while situating its events either on or overlooking the Greek Mediterranean, at the heart of Western myth and memory. Shot (by DP Andrés Felipe Morales) wide and at a reductive distance in order to capture all the unfolding absurdities and the hyperreal vistas in which they take place, the film at times recalls the works of Roy Andersson or Wes Anderson. Sadly, it lacks the melancholy of either, despite being similarly focused on death and oblivion.
Sofia is accompanied in her travels by her pet cockatoo Punky which captures and parrots snatches of its owner’s speech – chiefly, her frustrated swearing – in living imitation of what Sofia claims earthenware can also do. Along with other characters, Punky will meet his end, as, ultimately, we all must – but his likeness is preserved. This suggests that cinema is as good a medium as any for fragmentary memories (and memento mori). The film’s final image of the vibrator, decoloured, tattered by time and mounted as a future museum exhibit, offers a visual echo of a bird’s drumstick leg, as though to point to history’s hall of mirrors for those who have eyes to see or ears to hear.
The Megalomaniacs just premiered in the Rebels with a Cause section of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.
