← Back to Reviews
in
#162 - Eternity and a Day
Theo Angelopoulos, 1998
On the day before he has to check into hospital in regards to his terminal illness, a middle-aged poet goes on a strange odyssey with a homeless boy.
I'm still not sure how to feel about Theo Angelopoulos. This marks the fourth film of his I've seen, and while I can appreciate his slow-burning artistry to an extent, at this point I can't help but wonder if he makes genuinely good films or if they just seem good on the outside while not having much to say underneath. Eternity and a Day treads some familiar ground as it tracks the progression of Bruno Ganz's sick writer as he opts to spend his last day of relative freedom trying to help out a small boy who turns out to be an illegal alien (when he's not having flashbacks to an important day from his past, of course). Such a fundamentally simple plot becomes another vehicle for Angelopoulos's musings on subjects ranging from the broad (love and death) to the specific (immigration and child abduction), all of which are captured with his trademark long takes. There's the same distinctive visual style that makes even the most outwardly mundane scenery and actions at least a little engaging, to say nothing of the moments where the film exposes a dark underbelly to the ordinary surface (such as the scene where Ganz rescues the boy from his adult captors or even the part where they reach the border - the latter of which might just be the most striking image in the film). In any case, Eternity and a Day is about what you can expect from Angelopoulos as he manages to musters just enough substance to justify another extremely slow piece of work.
Theo Angelopoulos, 1998
On the day before he has to check into hospital in regards to his terminal illness, a middle-aged poet goes on a strange odyssey with a homeless boy.
I'm still not sure how to feel about Theo Angelopoulos. This marks the fourth film of his I've seen, and while I can appreciate his slow-burning artistry to an extent, at this point I can't help but wonder if he makes genuinely good films or if they just seem good on the outside while not having much to say underneath. Eternity and a Day treads some familiar ground as it tracks the progression of Bruno Ganz's sick writer as he opts to spend his last day of relative freedom trying to help out a small boy who turns out to be an illegal alien (when he's not having flashbacks to an important day from his past, of course). Such a fundamentally simple plot becomes another vehicle for Angelopoulos's musings on subjects ranging from the broad (love and death) to the specific (immigration and child abduction), all of which are captured with his trademark long takes. There's the same distinctive visual style that makes even the most outwardly mundane scenery and actions at least a little engaging, to say nothing of the moments where the film exposes a dark underbelly to the ordinary surface (such as the scene where Ganz rescues the boy from his adult captors or even the part where they reach the border - the latter of which might just be the most striking image in the film). In any case, Eternity and a Day is about what you can expect from Angelopoulos as he manages to musters just enough substance to justify another extremely slow piece of work.