Stratos, played by the excellent Vangelis Mourikis, works in a bread factory after getting out of prison- but he continues to work as a contract killer on the side – because he needs the money. Played with the dry, emotional deadness that you could expect from someone in Stratos’s line of work, we see that he still has a conscience as he tries to help his neighbours who have an eight-year-old child, Katerina, as well as a sick and bed-ridden grandfather that they are trying to care for. One of the most striking things about the film is how the outside of the blocks of flats and houses look rather attractive. This is a society that still seems OK on the surface but underneath the desperation of recession ridden Greek society leads what would be normal people to become prostitutes and pimps.
Economides’s plot is full of interesting twists and turns surprising the viewer with changes of course several times during it’s two and a half hours.
Stratos is both a cold-blooded killer and a selfless and honourable gangster who is working as a hitman to free Leonidas, a gangster kingpin who saved his life in prison. There is a dry, monk-life austerity to Stratos that somehow makes his violence and ruthlessness also austere. This is not the jokey blood and violence of a Tarrantino film. Stratos is a walking dead man. He kills in an entirely empty way.
The money Stratos earns is going towards a tunnel a group of gangsters is building under the prison so that the chief gangster, Leonidas, can escape from prison. But in the end having squeezed every penny from Stratos including making a final emotional appeal for even more money to “bail out” the imprisoned gangster, Leonidas, the gangsters who have been collecting the money make off for a life of luxury elsewhere.
The metaphor for what has happened in Greece since 2008 is painfully obvious. Squeezing dry the people who have become so desperate they will do anything to get money and then the promised bail out that will solve their problems never appears as the officials make off with the money and everyone realizes it’s all just a scam.
But there is somehow a message of hope here too. When the neighbours who Stratos has tried to help and who become increasingly corrupt and desperate as they sink lower and lower morally decide to sell the eight year old Katerina to a gangster who wants to rape her, saying “what can we do we need the money”, Stratos, who still has some decency left deep down somewhere in his soul, decides to kill his neighbours and rescue Katerina even though he is sacrificing himself and will die.
These are deep waters indeed and the neighbours who represent normal society in Greece which has become perverted somehow look worse than the brutal gangsters. Economides has created a Greek mythology of epic proportions for the present day Greek society with characters straight out of mythology that tell tales of universal truths.
Greece / Germany / Cyprus
Director: Yannis Economides
Cast: Vangelis Mourikis, Vicky Papadopoulou, Petros Zervos
