cospoz

I am impressed of the low rating of these 4 short films that comprise XX. I believe that rating sometimes mostly depends on the viewer's expectations.

XX (what a bad title) is a set of 4 short films. The films are indie in style and narrative so this is important to note before you watch them. If you love the prequel to the Texa's chainsaw massacre XX is NOT for you.

If you are always looking for something different in horror movies, a different way of telling a story or a different story all together XX IS for you.

I found "The Box," the first one of the short films to be most disturbing although "My Only Son" is an interesting reworking of a classic horror theme.

I was impressed by Oikonomidis' short film "Mono Mirizontas Giasemi," and "To Spirtokouto" fascinated me. The everyday decadence of a working-class Greek family, its depiction of contemporary Greek culture, the use of language, great, really great."I Psihi sto Stoma" was overdoing it, repeating the aesthetics of "To Spirtokouto" without much innovation in the script, but still acceptable. On the other hand, "Mahairovgaltis" has nothing much to say. The script is totally missing, the acting is less than OK and has nothing to add to the aesthetics of the movie-plus, the low-life working class theme is no news for Oikonomidis. The movie is flat, no climax whatsoever,the black-and-white aesthetic does not make its point. I only enjoyed the wonderful shots and the photography, but nothing else really.

"To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them?"

(Hamlet, III, 1, 58-62)

I begin this review with Hamlet's famous soliloquy that defined the western subject ever since. The question that Hamlet addresses is a question of existence, not a simple matter of living or not living. The issue of death arrives while contemplating on suicide. "To die, to sleep, no more;"

I believe that this strong existentialism that Hamlet expresses is one of the major themes of "The Road". To this very essential question of existence all characters provide their own responses. And whenever they choose "to be", a sea of troubles awaits for them. Pain becomes the only certainty of their life. The post-apocalyptic scene is the theatre of the exploration of the human condition where various responses are provided by different westerns subjects. The everlasting gray seems to have jumped out of a Beckettian universe, with the unfortunate fact though that the film cannot abandon its Hollywood origin.

The film is a magnificent intermingling of subplots, while the main plot being simply the long and dangerous road to Ithaka, to remember Cavafy's famous poem, beginning and ending "in media res". What impressed me was the wonderful aesthetics it possessed in its multiple interconnected narratives, with so many different genres being part of the same movie, from classic horror movies with Faulknerian innuendos, such as "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre", to science fiction dystopias, to modern dramas, even to American propaganda films, such as "The Pursuit of Happiness".

"No God. No Father Christmas. No fairies. No Narnia. No f@cking nothing"-Sarah Kane, Blasted.

"The Road" is not a dream but a nightmare of the Void,this void beautifully expressed by Kane's quotation above, where among others the question of humanity an its values do arise. In a world where all constables are lost, what remains is what makes us humans. That is "the fire" that the protagonists carry. And hope, like the lilacs that breed out of the dead land, springs out its early flowers in the very end.