Landscape in the Mist

Described by New York Times critic Stephen Holden as a filmmaker who “belongs to a stately modernist tradition that embraces figures as divergent as Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert Bresson and Wim Wenders”, it is easy to draw comparisons between Theodoros Angelopoulos and the aforementioned; however, I get the impression that doing so would not quite do Angelopoulos’ work justice. Much like Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960), Angelopoulos’ Landscape in the Mist (1988) deals with the search for someone who is not there; a search which becomes a “symbolic quest for value in a world that has grown spiritually hollow.” However, whereas the search in L’Avventura is instigated by a disappearance, the search we witness in Landscape in the Mist is a much more “anguished and hopeless” one than in L’Avventura – if you could imagine such a thing.

The film centres around two children, Voula and her younger brother Alexander, who run away from home in an attempt to find their father – who there mother has told them now lives in Germany, far away from their native Greece. It is not long before we realise that the children are not going to find their father; however, the film takes on a much deeper meaning, as the children begin to learn about the real world through the events and people they encounter on their travels; Alexander learns that he must work in return for food; Voula learns about the dangers and brutality one can encounter in the real world in what is easily the most horrific scene in the film; and both children learn about love, trust and friendship from Orestes, a helpful acquaintance they make along the way.

In his otherwise positive review of the film, Holden accuses Angelopoulos’ imagery of verging on the “heavy-handed.” Personally, however, I do not think this is a bad thing. Whilst having a seemingly blank piece of film symbolise the ambivalence of the children’s ongoing search (Orestes tells the children that if they look hard enough they may find a landscape of trees in the mist of the film) only to have the film end with the children embracing a tree they find upon a misty landscape (even if it is suggested they may be dead) isn’t entirely subtle symbolism, it is perhaps Angelopoulos’ ‘heavy-handedness’ that makes these images all the more effective and is perhaps why, as Holden put it, “there are sights in the film that once seen cannot be forgotten.”