MVFF33: 'Black Field'

This striking image by DP Marcus Waterloo from Vardis Marinakis's film Black Field is as good an introduction to the film's merits as anything I could say. Speaking in strictly visual terms, the film is a pure delight. The first third of the movie is so loaded with potent symbols that viewers might sense the coming of something miraculous - but, radiant cinematography aside, the whole does not really live up to expectations. It is still a beautiful film, with a confident, assured pace and masterful touch, but its themes are smaller than we are led to expect after witnessing the fantastic chiascuro images of the early scenes. It is a period drama set in Ottoman-ruled Greece in 1654; an escaped janissary (a Christian forced into service in the Ottoman army) washes up on the doorstep of a convent, where he is nursed (in chains) back to health and escapes with one of the nuns, who turns out to have been a boy all along. Their path takes them through some enchanted country, green and delicate, with rocks and pools glittering in patches of filtered sun or looming out of coils of mist. It all looks so much grander than the human story unfolding within it, which is essentially one of sexual awakening or gender liberation - no insignificant thing, to be sure, but not epic enough for this stage. I was wanting The Seventh Seal, or Macbeth, or something of that order. Early scenes, like that of the nun lying like a statue of carved stone in her stone-colored shroud, of an iron key in a slice of sunlight, the beautiful naked body of the man in chains attended by silent, black-clad women, the cremation and burial of the horse, the fog and flames and lightning, not to mention the liturgical atmosphere of the entire set, all combine to stir up the grandest possibilities imaginable. The film wants more gravitas to fulfill its promise, more complexity, perhaps simply more death, which would balance the life-affirming principle at work in the human theme and embody the shadows of its visual register. As it is, we are left with the curious feeling of having watched two films spliced together, and the loss of the one we want spoils the one we get.