24FPS @ Raindance: Pause [2018]

Dir: Tonia Mishiali

Over the past few years, there has been a lot of coverage of coercive control relationships and marriages, with the behaviour finally being recognised as the form of abuse that it is. With Pause, her first feature, Tonia Mishali takes a stark look at Elpida (Stella Fyrogeni), a woman in her early 50s whose husband Costas (Andreas Vasileiou), while he goes out to work, controls just about every aspect of her life. 

Mishiali begins by laying out the mundane reality of Elpida’s life. She sometimes looks after her friend’s baby granddaughter, but otherwise passes the days alone in her flat, cleaning and cooking. Repeated shots of her and her husband at the table, only ever speaking for functional reasons, and of them each watching their own TVs (Elpida’s an old CRT that she’s forced to use headphones to watch) hammer home the lack of any affection in the home. We also see that the purse strings are entirely held by Costas, who doles out small amounts day by for groceries. When Elpida asks for money for a haircut, he refuses (“Your hair is fine as it is”).

Elpida’s few escapes from this reality are closed down as the film goes on; Costas taking more and more from her, and Elpida escapes into brief fantasies. In an interesting choice from Mishiali, these moments of fantasy are never cued for us, and as we see more of them even the exits from the fantasy sequences aren’t clear, so while it’s obvious when a handsome young neighbour turns and kisses Elpida in the hallway that it’s not real, a later encounter with a man painting the apartment building is more ambiguous.

The depiction of coercive control feels very real, disturbingly so, and Stella Fyrogeni (also seen in the festival in a supporting role in Patchwork) is outstanding as she plays both Elpida’s near total detachment and her fleeting moments of hope—real or fantasised. While the screenplay has a few clunky moments throughout (the painter’s “Bye bye, Hope” to Elpida is painfully on the nose), there is one moment towards the end of the film that feels very out of place and wildly out of character for Elpida. It’s as if Mishiali decided that she needed one real shock sequence in the film, which is otherwise concerned with the way that implied threat can control someone’s life. It doesn’t work in the moment, but worse than that, for me it unravels some of the good work from before, because that’s the moment it’s building to.

Much of Pause is a hauntingly close up and credible portrait of an abusive relationship, it may stumble badly at its last hurdle, but Stella Fyrogeni’s performance is worth the running time by itself.
★★★

Pause screens at 6:20 on October 31st at the Curzon Hoxton, and online at Curzon Home Cinema from November 1st-3rd