Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow

2004 Director Theo Angelopoulos

With The Weeping Meadow, one of filmmaking's greatest remaining masters embarks on his crowning achievement: a projected trilogy whose goal is nothing less than "a poetic summing up of the century that just ended."

This first film, spanning 1919-1949, begins with refugees from Odessa settling on a piece of land that was promised to them on Greece's misty northern plains. In a transgression of mythic proportions, the foundling Eleni falls in love with her adoptive brother Alexis and, after marrying his widowed father, flees with her lover to the nearby port of Thessaloniki. As the unrest of the 1930s pits fascism against leftism, Alexis, a talented musician, departs for America and leaves Eleni behind to bear the brunt of Greek history: war, political repression, civil war.

The ambition of Angelopoulos's concept is matched by the grandeur of his style, which takes his majestically fluid camerawork to new heights of virtuosity and produces a steady stream of stunning images. More boldly than ever, Angelopoulos juggles foreground and background, personal and political, story and history into a vision that is simultaneously tragic and epic, capped by a powerful allegorical vision of a "weeping meadow" that feeds the river of history with the tears of individual griefs.