Keitel on the Wine-Dark Sea

Imbuing the camera's eye with spiritual significance, director Theo Angelopoulos brings us the visually beautiful, yet emotionally challenging "Ulysses' Gaze." Through the story of a director's earnest search for a film reel from the earliest history of cinema, Angelopoulos chronicles a greater quest for lost innocence and an untainted view.

As the fictional director A. (Harvey Keitel) is wandering through the war-torn landscape of the presentday Balkans, Angelopoulos recalls the Homeric journey of Odysseus--a masterful blend of past and present suggesting the inseparability of the two. Fortunately, however, the film is not an exercise in "updating a myth": although many characters from the "Odyssey" are evoked, the film adopts a sufficiently individual identity and a notably different conclusion.

The movie begins with A.'s return home to Greece, to the stormy reception of his latest movie, showing early on the social impact cinema can have. This spurs A. to question himself and, by extension, a closer view of his work, leading to his search for old documentary reels made by the Manakis brothers, early figures in Balkan cinema. As A. travels from country to country, including the fractured parts of the former Yugoslavia, he tries to track down where these lost reels ended up in the half-century or more since their last showing. Locales charged with history replace Odysseus' mythic destinations; the people A. encounters each adopts one or more of the characteristics from Homeric characters such as Nauticaa and Persephone.

More important than the plot itself is the director's distinct visual style: largely based upon carefully composed, lingering views of the landscape, usually culminating at some point with a striking tableau that freezes in one's mind even as the camera keeps moving. Angelopoulos captures unforgettable images in scenes with the most carefully constructed, basic of elements: for example, the juxtaposition of a group of people and policemen, the one under wet, dark umbrellas and the other shining wisp-like lights. Angelopoulos works with a ponderous grace as if searching for the same pure style that A. seeks in the old reels.

The reels themselves blend the historical with the universal: through their unbiased view of daily life in the Balkans, they represent a clarity of vision (literally, the "gaze" of the film's title) from the past. This multi-layered sensitivity to the co-existence of history, and the present, shows up early on: the film opens by spanning, in one shot, people filming a boat years ago, and Keitel's A. in the present.

To some, however, Angelopoulos' style may sometimes seem too lingering or, in a sense, too thorough. (Other Angelopoulos films, "Landscape in the Mist" and "The Traveling Players," can be seen at the HFA this weekend). Long, sustained shots prevail, inviting a contemplation of the image's inextricable connection to the passage of time that not all viewers may have the patience to attempt. The carefully interwoven themes of the historical and the aesthetic may seem almost too perfectly constructed. It is interesting to note that Angelopoulos, upon winning second prize for the film at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival, stormed off immediately after recieving the award because he was so confident of the first-place quality of his film's vision.

Ultimately, the film delivers a certain honesty and sensitivity that one cannot help but admire--especially by the harsh reality of the final scene, where the present in Bosnia comes painfully to the fore. For the movie admits, implicitly, a self-doubt, a possibility of failure, but one that encourages further introspection: such is the nature of serious search, a journey in the modern world.