The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea – To thávma tis thálassas ton Sargassón (2019)

Directed by: Syllas Tzoumerkas | 121 minutes | crime, drama | Actors: Angeliki Papoulia, Youla Boudali, Hristos Passalis, Argyris Xafis, Thanasis Dovris, Laertis Malkotsis, Maria Filini, Michalis Kimonas, Christian Culbida, Thanos Tokakis, Laertis Vasiliou, Katerina Helmy, Alkistis Poulopoulou

‘The Miracle of Sargasso Sea’ begins with a flashback: a raid by a terrorist unit that violently assaults an anarchist community in Athens. Responsible Police Inspector Elisabeth (Papulia) is transferred to a small eel fishing village in western Greece. Back in the present – ​​ten years later, a second main character is introduced, Rita – a working-class woman with a sleepy marriage (Boudali). Elisabeth is an alcoholic who tries to keep up appearances for her son, Rita, a woman with a hopeless job who earns some extra money from drug trafficking, or worse. The men are shadowy creatures.

The film offers the story of recent Greece, torn between hope and despair, between left and right. City and country meet in Elisabeth and Rita: empowered or opportunistic women, strong and weak at the same time. The atmospheric drawing is more than in order, an adequate image storyteller is at work here: beautiful landscapes, people with decay. They sometimes do exciting things, although they lead to little. Tzoumerkas (‘A Blast’) navigates a middle path with different perspectives, man as the plaything of circumstances in a mirror story of two women who end up in comparable misery from different backgrounds.

Tzoumerkas sketches a world of cyclical pain, beyond the future. It’s the right tone, which needs little plot, and certainly can’t use sentimentalism: despair enough. Life is hard, acting to make something out of it is preferable to crying, although sometimes that involves a bottle of booze.

The misery shown seems to be undergoing almost ritual, as if in difficult circumstances man has no choice. Perhaps that is simply the case in the depicted Greece, a world of Hieronymus Bosch in moving images; the story of a lost generation.