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

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