Rent Ulysses' Gaze (1995)

For the Journey - Ulysses' Gaze review by ST

This fascinating but flawed film follows the journey of a distinguished Greek film director as he travels through the Balkans in search of three lost reels of film from the first makers of cinema in Greece. Harvey Keitel plays the director who at times shifts into the past and begins to get entangled in the complex overlaying histories of the countries he travels through -- Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania, eventually arriving in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war of the 1990s. I found the settings and images of this work utterly compelling, and got drawn into the drama of the unfolding journey -- the spectacle of the titanic fragments of a dismembered statue of Lenin being transported on a river barge are surely some of the most arresting in European cinema -- and yet this trajectory seemed to overwhelm the more individualised aspects of the film. The characters seemed to me like bit-players; tokens or types inserted into the narrative but without agency, depth or colour, limiting the impact of the film's thesis on European history. Keitel himself struck me as incredibly wooden, struggling to wrest meaning and nuance out of lines of lacklustre dialogue, at odds with a non-native English speaking cast throughout. Nevertheless, the film is worthwhile -- not flinching from an incredibly brutal and unexpected denouement which has an impact far beyond the sum of the rest of its parts.