European Films

A handsome young Albanian dreaming of a future as a rock star in Greece finds himself hustling and killing a client instead in Angeliki Antoniou’s assured drama Eduart. When thrown in jail on unrelated charges upon his return to Albania, he has all the time in the world to contemplate his actions and come to his senses, with a German doctor acting as the Svidrigailov to Eduart’s Raskolnikov. Rather than as a simple redemption drama, however, the true interest of Eduart lies in the way it offers an Albanian immigrant’s point of view as presented through Greek eyes, with the Stockholm syndrome and Freudian and ancient Greek definitions of domination, exploitation and foreignness playing out in the background. The Greek-German co-production was named the Best Greek Film at the 2006 Thessaloniki Film Festival.

After Constantine Giannaris directed Omiros (Hostage) in 2005, a true story of a bus hijacking in northern Greece staged by an Albanian immigrant who -- at least in the film -- was a very handsome man, director Angeliki Antoniou films another story of an Albanian immigrant gone wrong in Greece that is again fact-based and headlined by an extremely handsome lead: Kosovar actor Eshref Durmishi. Whether all Albanian immigrants have lucky genes or being sexy is just a prerequisite for a role in a film is never really clear, but in both these harrowing stories the relatively ordered Greek society is upended by exotic immigrants who would like to dominate Greek society but in their desperation ruin their dreams and destinies.

 

Is Greek society still as xenophobe as 2500 years ago, and do the Greeks, at the same time, secretly still long to be dominated by those luscious and decadent foreigners? If the country’s cinematic output is anything to go by, the answer is a resounding "yes," with the foreigners initially paying the price for the contradiction between these two extreme desires and the Greek population having to suffer at their hands when the foreigners are almost forced into crime. If Freud were still alive today and interested in film, he would have had a field day analysing the Greek macho posturing that seems to hide strong masochist tendencies.

 

As Eduart, Durmishi finds just the right balance between youthful recklessness, desperation and a subdued kind of pensiveness that might save him in the end. German actor André Hennicke, who played the stern and monolithic religious leader in Costanzo’s In memoria di me (In Memory of Myself) earlier this year, has a splashier and more nuanced role here as the German doctor who runs the jail’s sick bay though he is also incarcerated himself (one wonders what they will do with the sick when he’s served his time). Their strange friendship -- if it can be called that -- has the odd ring of truth about it. Their scenes together in jail are the film's best, with the writer-director mixing humanity, the burden of guilt, the problems of everyday life and the humane reaction of wanting to escape confinement into a potent whole.

 

Supporting actors -- including Ermela Teli as Eduart's sister, Ndricim Xhepa as his army general father who turns him in for robbery and Adrian Aziri as a kind inmate -- are strong across the board, though they would have needed some more space to become characters of flesh and blood. As it stands, Eduart's dire situation at home feels like an excuse, not a contributing cause to his woes. 

 

Cinematographer Jürgen Jürges, who has filmed some of Fassbinder and Haneke’s most important films, brings an understated look of grace to the film that perfectly matches Antoniou’s subdued tone, while editor Takis Yannopoulos (Nyfes (Brides)) strings all the scenes together here with a nice forward momentum but without haste.