24FPS @ Raindance: Patchwork

Dir: Petros Charalambous

As one of the leads in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth and Alps, Angeliki Papoulia was one of the faces of the so-called Greek Weird Wave of cinema in the late 00’s and early 2010s. She followed Lanthimos into his English language debut, The Lobster, but otherwise has remained in the Greek (and here the Cypriot) film industry.

Papoulia plays Chara, a housewife in her 40s with a dull but comfortable job, a nice husband (Andreas C. Tselepos), and a six-year-old daughter. Outwardly, her life looks close to ideal, but Chara is depressed, worried she is a bad mother. Things get shaken up when Melina (Joy Rieger), the teenage daughter of a new colleague, asks to do work experience with Chara and the older woman begins to see herself as a surrogate mother.

Patchwork rests pretty much entirely on Angeliki Papoulia’s performance, and in that respect, it’s a great success. Much of the work she has to do here is about things that are, for a long time, unspoken to the other characters—the doubts she has about having another child with her husband, her fractured relationship with her mother, and the way this plays into how she sees Melina. Papoulia is excellent at all this, indicating these elements to the audience while Chara is visibly trying to hide them from those around her. She gets to the meanings beneath the film’s often on-the-nose dialogue: long before she explains it to Melina, we can see in how she treats the younger woman that what she’s really doing when giving her advice is essentially talking to herself at Melina’s age.

This is the weakness of the screenplay; as much as Papoulia is able to make them play, scenes later in the film often simply explain out loud everything we’ve been reading perfectly well from her performance. Melina isn’t written with quite the same depth, but Joy Reiger (though visibly older than her character), manages to give some life to her beyond the stereotype of an alienated 16-year-old. Melina’s interest in patchwork quilting gives the film its title, but there’s also a sense here that the title Patchwork is meant to be about the way people stitch their adult lives together; the parts don’t always match perfectly, and she doesn’t always like the way that some of them feel, but Chara pulls those pieces together into some kind of whole. That’s where the film is at its best, and Papoulia’s performance, as is so often the case, makes it worth seeing all by itself. 

★★★½

Patchwork screens at 3:10 on October 31st at the Genesis Cinema, and online at Curzon Home Cinema from November 1st-3rd