The film by Yiannis Ekonomides “Heaven”, the original Greek name sounds like “Fish”, and the film was called “Stratos”.
A film about a hired killer, or rather about the role of a little man in the big game of the powerful of this world, or even more precisely the search for the principles of morality, morality and spirituality in a society living according to the laws of force.
Yannis Ekonomides is a Greek director, actor and screenwriter, a bright representative of the new Greek wave.
Stratos, the killer. A killer investing the money he earned from the murders in the escape from Leonidas prison, to whom he owes his life, Leonidas saved Stratos while he was serving a prison sentence.
The escape of Leonidas is not facilitated by circumstances in the person of the local bandit Petropolus, /who puts Stratos a strict condition, or he goes to work, /killer, of course / or death.
Next door to Stratos lives a family, the head of the family reconciled with the fact that his wife is engaged in prostitution, / sells himself for debts to Petropolus /, which is not enough and he laid eyes on their young daughter. My parents don't mind.
It's like that. And rest assured, all these storylines will tie in a tight tangle.
So what's the movie about? That in a dishonest world it is possible to live according to the laws of honor, or that these laws are not written for everyone. The truth is always in the middle.
Stratos shoots his victims in cold blood, never questioning the correctness of his actions. Nothing personal. Stratos is silent, but something is probably spinning in his head, some invisible war is happening, at the worst end, they are looking for excuses. Is it personal? And the money received for the “work”, the money he is going to spend to cleanse his conscience. Is human conscience personal or social? Society, /social order /, seemingly, is not mentioned, / it is implied that there is / that dictates the line of behavior of the characters of the film.
Almost the entire film Stratos collects money, so that in the end he beautifully dumped accomplices. His accomplices beautifully threw him to pretend that they also do not question the correctness of their actions, it is quite possible that this money is going to be spent for the same purpose. And so on forever.
There is no end to anything in nature, but if you go the other way, there is no beginning. It was before us and it will be after us. And to fit into your life niche, not enough, you need to understand something, at least to remain yourself, at least try.
Everyone should try to do at least one worthy thing to justify their existence in this world. In a world that lives by its own laws (often having nothing to do with our ideas of rightness and expediency).
And then Stratos loses the meaning, the meaning of life, the meaning of actions in the name of honor, the meaning of kindness of the heart, the meaning of the search for justice, and tried to be honest, and kind and just.
It's not that simple.
After viewing, there are not only questions, but also unpleasant residue. Everything seems to be said, but not as it is said. Not so, according to your scale of worldview, worldview and experience of life.
Speaking of birds, I mean fish. You seem to be living pretty well. You have your own small business, your own penny, a loving wife, children grow up, what a person still needs, for happiness. Take your time. Answer first, who are you in the hierarchy of life, the middle class, if the fish is also middle? No, you are a small fish, there are no medium-sized fish in nature. The average eats the small, and they, in turn, eat the large, so in this aspect they are also small.
In other words, in order to maintain the natural balance, either you or you must eat, (of course, but, nevertheless) And the one who is less than that. This is a simple solution to the problem of life.
Don't think about it, say it, and think about it, sometimes it can be very useful to think.
StratosFera. Somewhere in the sky, dotted with olive gold clouds and dimmed silver stars, and stratified and slowly melting under the hot sun like oil. Auction of total silence, Christian vow of silence. Words that get stuck in the throat with a pressing lump, and the brain is torn by questions, screams, sobs, tantrums and mysteries passing into a thick void with a deaf echo, without echoes and responses. A vacuum of discommunicability, dehumanization and dehumanization. The life theater of the absurd, in which Stratos, an ordinary bakery worker, is destined to wear the mask of a bloodthirsty killer with a kind heart. He is a whipping boy, whom everyone is used to insulting, humiliating, tearing off all his anger on him, accumulated not for days, but for years, for centuries, for millennia. But one day the boy will grow up, complete his sacred vow, and go on the path of not his own, but someone else’s salvation over the corpses.
Over the past few years, if we take the countdown from 2009 and the sensational "Fang" Lanthimos, who became the laureate of most prestigious European film festivals, in fact, for almost the Soviet five-year plan, Greek author's cinema is in a state of constant development and evolution, more and more, with each new picture of the so-called "Greek New Wave", whose films annually successfully participate in Cannes, Venetian and Berlin shows, moving to the forefront of all European cinema. To replace the classics Kakoyannis, Nicolaidis, Angelopoulos, Kunturos, Damianos and other patriarchs, in fact, founded Greek cinema from the beginnings, came a lot of young and very ambitious directors, which include the aforementioned Lanthimos, Nikos Perakis, Kokkinos, Spiros Statulopoulos, Angelos Francis, etc. and who put forward a deep social background to the fore of all their films, getting rid of the usual husk of mythologization, pretty much dominated the cinema of Greece. The new film of the new Greece meets all the demands of a vague and difficult time, drawing before the audience in gloomy and hopeless tones in the best spirit of tough blackness a portrait of modern society, experiencing severe trauma and post-traumatic stress from economic and social collapse, for hardworking and ever positive Greeks became tantamount to suicide.
In his third full-length directorial work, one of the most promising representatives of the Greek new wave, Yiannis Ekonomides (the director’s name is extremely telling, given the total artistic and stylistic austerity of his picture), the film Heaven in 2014, also known as Stratos by the name of the main character, but also having additional significance as “Fish” (To Mikro Psari is treated just so, if to speak directly, without shades and halftones), in order to emphasize the wordlessness and almost impotence of the central antagonist, who is first presented in the framework of the recent Berlin, who lives in an economic situation, who is trying to correspond to him in an alien society. Stratos is not a priori attracted to the “hero of our time”; he is too unsympathetic, too dull in his worthlessness, too bad to truly be called good. He, of course, according to the postmodern laws of the modern criminal genre (the shadow of Tarantino and Balabanov over the picture will hover constantly, until the final, but it will be just a shadow, because the genre lure of the tape gangster cinema will remain such), will have a chance to save his own and someone else's soul, to which he is not indifferent, but also the obvious indifference he does not occupy, and the right to a bloody rebellion against the system in the suffocating conditions of which Stratos lives and successfully survives, due to the fact that he does not care. His rebellion does not seem really convincing, there is no Orthodox in him insight and repentance; he saves the innocent inertially, because it is necessary, and even his remorse seems too straightforward, inscribed in order to justify the hero who put death on the stream. This universal inertia, spiritual coma and spiritual hibernation, in which the two-faced Stratos lives, is characteristic of everyone around. And it kills more than a bullet in the heart or a knife in the back. And Stratos is still silent, soaking up the surrounding anger like a sponge and releasing it with his next murder, which can not be justified by anything: neither profession, nor the baseness of customers, nor need.
For the director, the main character is a man who aspires to nothing. He does not go with the flow of life or against it, rejecting obvious benefits for himself, but not going after self-flagellation. Obsessing on refrains of reproaches and hysterical screams, in the finale already thrown not so much in the direction of the main character as in the direction of the audience( 'What are you laughing at?! You laugh at yourself, although you want to cry out of powerlessness and despair. Economides argues that a society that has experienced a total crisis is on the path of severing mutual understanding, breaking ties between people, on the path of total discommunicability and dysfunction. Depriving his controversial, frankly marginal hero of the right to speak, the right to choose and realize himself, Ekonomides represents a whole polyphonic voice of other characters. The symbolism in the picture is not that minimalistic, but very textbook; The Stratos fish does not draw on the image of Jesus, who should be crucified in the final, due to his total antiheroicization. He too fits into the paradigms of the standard heroes of criminal chronicles and reports, and honor for him is as formal and protocol (the law of service for service, and nothing personal), as love in a neighbor who has nothing to love, mired in blood, dirt and sins. Such a neighbor does not need saviors, especially if they themselves do not differ in special holiness.
Society becomes blind, mute and deaf, passive in its depression and accumulating anger, which can burst out overnight, sweeping everyone and everything in its path with a bloody whirlwind, a tsunami. Stratos is too typical of such a society. Elusively, “Heaven” with its absurdism and liquefied genre is somewhat reminiscent of Kira Muratova’s films of the 90s, as from “Asthenic Syndrome” or “Sensible Policeman” with their characteristic themes of complete human misunderstanding and destruction of relations against the background of huge historical shifts. Greece, in fact, since 2009, has picked up this asthenic syndrome, but, unfortunately, “Heaven” directed by Economides does not pull on a full-fledged portrait of a sick society, being a specific concentrate that tells the sad story of the Greek Leone, about a predatory fish choking in the stratosphere of the promised heavens.
StratosFera. Somewhere in the sky, dotted with olive gold clouds and dimmed silver stars, and stratified and slowly melting under the hot sun like oil. Auction of total silence, Christian vow of silence. Words that get stuck in the throat with a pressing lump, and the brain is torn by questions, screams, sobs, tantrums and mysteries passing into a thick void with a deaf echo, without echoes and responses. A vacuum of discommunicability, dehumanization and dehumanization. The life theater of the absurd, in which Stratos, an ordinary bakery worker, is destined to wear the mask of a bloodthirsty killer with a kind heart. He is a whipping boy, whom everyone is used to insulting, humiliating, tearing off all his anger on him, accumulated not for days, but for years, for centuries, for millennia. But one day the boy will grow up, complete his sacred vow, and go on the path of not his own, but someone else’s salvation over the corpses.
Over the past few years, if we take the countdown from 2009 and the sensational "Fang" Lanthimos, who became the laureate of most prestigious European film festivals, in fact, for almost the Soviet five-year plan, Greek author's cinema is in a state of constant development and evolution, more and more, with each new picture of the so-called "Greek New Wave", whose films annually successfully participate in Cannes, Venetian and Berlin screenings, advancing to the forefront of all European cinema. To replace the classics Kakoyannis, Nicolaidis, Angelopoulos, Kunturos, Damianos and other patriarchs, in fact, founded Greek cinema from the beginnings, came a lot of young and very ambitious directors, which include the aforementioned Lanthimos, Nikos Perakis, Kokkinos, Spiros Statulopoulos, Angelos Francis, etc. and who put forward a deep social background to the fore of all their films, getting rid of the usual husk of mythologization, pretty much dominated the cinema of Greece. The new film of the new Greece meets all the demands of a vague and difficult time, drawing before the audience in gloomy and hopeless tones in the best spirit of tough blackness a portrait of modern society, experiencing severe trauma and post-traumatic stress from economic and social collapse, for hardworking and ever positive Greeks became tantamount to suicide.
In his third full-length directorial work, one of the most promising representatives of the Greek new wave Yiannis Ekonomides (the director's surname is extremely telling, given the total artistic and stylistic austerities of his picture), the film "Heaven" in 2014, also known as "Stratos" by the name of the main character, but also having additional significance as "Fish" (To Mikro Psari is treated just so, if to speak directly, without shades and semitones), in order to emphasize the wordlessness and almost inmoral antality of the central antagonist, first presented in the framework of the recent Berlin, who is trying to correspond to him in an economic situation. Stratos is not a priori drawn to the “hero of our time”; he is too unsympathetic, too dull in his meaninglessness, too bad to truly be called good. He, of course, according to the postmodern laws of the modern criminal genre (the shadow of Tarantino and Balabanov over the picture will hover constantly, until the final, but it will be just a shadow, because the genre lure of the tape gangster cinema will remain such), will have a chance to save his own and someone else's soul, to which he is not indifferent, but also the obvious indifference he does not occupy, and the right to a bloody rebellion against the system in the suffocating conditions of which Stratos lives and successfully survives, due to the fact that he does not care. His rebellion does not seem really convincing, there is no Orthodox in him insight and repentance; he saves the innocent inertially, because it is necessary, and even his remorse seems too straightforward, inscribed in order to justify the hero who put death on the stream. This universal inertia, spiritual coma and spiritual hibernation, in which the two-faced Stratos lives, is characteristic of everyone around. And it kills more than a bullet in the heart or a knife in the back. And Stratos is still silent, soaking up the surrounding anger like a sponge and releasing it with his next murder, which can not be justified by anything: neither profession, nor the baseness of customers, nor need.
For the director, the main character is a man who aspires to nothing. He does not go with the flow of life or against it, rejecting obvious benefits for himself, but not going after self-flagellation. Obsessing on refrains of reproaches and hysterical screams, in the finale already thrown not so much in the direction of the main character as in the direction of the audience( 'What are you laughing at?! You laugh at yourself, although you want to cry out of powerlessness and despair. Economides argues that a society that has experienced a total crisis is on the path of severing mutual understanding, breaking ties between people, on the path of total discommunicability and dysfunction. Depriving his controversial, frankly marginal hero of the right to speak, the right to choose and realize himself, Ekonomides represents a whole polyphonic voice of other characters. The symbolism in the picture is not that minimalistic, but very textbook; The Stratos fish does not draw on the image of Jesus, who should be crucified in the final, due to his total antiheroicization. He too fits into the paradigms of the standard heroes of criminal chronicles and reports, and honor for him is as formal and protocol (the law of service for service, and nothing personal), as love in a neighbor who has nothing to love, mired in blood, dirt and sins. Such a neighbor does not need saviors, especially if they themselves do not differ in special holiness.
Society becomes blind, mute and deaf, passive in its depression and accumulating anger, which can burst out overnight, sweeping everyone and everything in its path with a bloody whirlwind, a tsunami. Stratos is too typical of such a society. Elusively, “Heaven” with its absurdism and liquefied genre is somewhat reminiscent of Kira Muratova’s films of the 90s, like “Asthenic Syndrome” or “Sensible Policeman” with their characteristic themes of complete human misunderstanding and destruction of relations against the background of huge historical shifts. Greece, in fact, since 2009, has picked up this asthenic syndrome, but, unfortunately, “Heaven” directed by Economides is not drawn to a full-fledged portrait of a sick society, being a specific concentrate that tells the sad story of Greek Leone, about a predatory fish choking in the stratosphere of the promised heavens.
8 out of 10