The book of love is long and boring
No one can lift the damn thing
It's full of charts and facts, and figures
And instructions for dancing
(Μαγνητικά πεδία)
dir: Yorgos Goussis
2022
You could be thinking, based on the title or the poster, that this could be a documentary about legendary band The Magnetic Fields, but then that’s probably unlikely, because you’re way too smart to make that mistake. And if you were a fan of The Magnetic Fields, you would probably know there was already a documentary about them from 2010 called Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields, and you probably watched it since with much enjoyment, and then went and listened to your favourite parts of their epic 3 part album 69 Love Songs.
That’s not what you’re going to get from watching this. If this wasn’t a Greek movie made during the start of the pandemic, you would think it was an American film made during the mumblecore era (2000s – 2010s) with no budget and a recommendation to the actors not to do too much acting in any given scene. Save it all for a screaming match at the end.
Most of the movie, like 99% of it, transpires on the Greek island of Kefalonia, a beautiful place that I’ve actually been to. But none of the point of this flick is to highlight any of that, because it’s not a none too subtle travel advert sponsored by the tourism bureau or anything like that.
If anything the flick is saying “if you’re bored and experiencing existential angst you could do worse than come here”. The whole flick has an experimental vibe, in that it seems like there’s a very loose premise, that the actors came up with their characters, possibly on the fly, and the overall flick has only a loose idea of where it’s going as it’s meandering along, at any given time.
That’s okay with me. I’m one of the few people on this planet films like this are made for. I don’t so much watch something like this thinking “is something interesting going to eventually happen?”, so much as “I wonder what nonsense these two will get up to next.”
Both characters end up with their cars on the ferry to Kefalonia. Only one of them has a specific reason for being there. I think most of the flick transpires over a weekend, maybe a Friday to a Sunday. Antoni (Antonis Tsiotsiopoulos) carries a metal box, in which are the bones of an aunt. It seems grim, and there’s even a name for such a box, being an ossuary box, but it’s not because of serial killer bullshit or anything like that. She wanted to be buried on the island where she’d been born. It’s not unusual for immigrant Greeks to ask their kids or relatives to have their bones dug up after they die (after seven years), to be taken back to their village, in the homeland, for their final resting place.
Wait a second, I wrote that down like such an activity makes any sense and doesn’t sound at all insane. What can I say, it’s a cultural thing. It’s one of the many, many things people do that seems sane to them and deranged to others.
Wait till I tell you about a bunch of people who worship a carpenter nailed to two planks of wood over 2000 years ago!
Can’t be helped. Anyway, that’s his character – bearded guy in a beanie with a box.
Elena (Elena Topalidou) has even less reason to be there. Fleeing from her life, she tells her partner on the phone that she’s driven to Thessaloniki, but she’s gone on a ferry to an island for…reasons.
We never really find out why. It could just be dissatisfaction with life, with marriage, she could just be deeply depressed. For long stretches of the movie I feared that she had come to the island to off herself, but nothing that interesting happens in this flick, not that I would have wanted that to happen. There is a chaotic aspect to her interactions, like a sometimes barely contained frantic energy. If she is to be believed, she is a dancer by trade, but the thought of dancing professionally again disgusts her. And yet we often see her dancing for her own amusement.
Why? Don’t ask me, I only watched a film, I’m not a psychologist.
She also speaks of no longer recognising herself in the mirror, the face she sees. Yeah, you and a billion other aging people, but she finds it more confusing, more disconcerting, and it doesn’t seem to be discomfort with the ravages of time and aging. It seems more like disassociation, a fracturing of the self. This is highlighted in a scene where she watches herself from three different angles in the mirrors of an old vanity.
She relates this as she relates everything to Antoni, who gruffly either disagrees or agrees as the case may seem to require, being less demonstrative, himself. They get along with a certain warmth, but also a certain politeness, as is dictated by custom.
Their meeting, by chance, just after the ferry ride, is precipitated by Antoni’s car breaking down and needing repairs, and Elena offering to give him a lift to accommodation. They both end up having dinner together and staying at a hotel, but in separate rooms, of course.
The flick is called Magnetic Fields. You could of course be forgiven for thinking this could be a flick about attraction, but if it is, it’s certainly not about sexual attraction. I mean, I don’t know what happened in scenes I didn’t see, but other than one scene much later on, I didn’t get the sense that they were getting it on when we weren’t watching.
What propels them towards each other, I think, is loneliness, instead of desire, but then again it’s hard to say.
They spend a lot of the movie driving around the island in Elena’s car, which she calls Georges, again, for reasons never explained.
When they are rebuffed by the caretakers at the local church / graveyard, it seems the intention to re-bury the aunt won’t go as planned, but moreso what I got out of this scene, where Antoni is told that his aunt doesn’t have an automatic right to be buried there, mostly because she wasn’t a resident of the island, and there’s nothing tying her to that spot, what begins there and is carried over to a later scene beside a collapsed roadway, is an absolute masterclass in Greek sarcasm and passive-aggressiveness. My gods, the venom and invective that is expressed by two men trying to express how much they loathe each other yet using polite forms of address and pretend well-wishing is just, holy shit, Greeks are terrible people, if I ever had any doubt.
Look, for a flick like this to work for you, you have to be the kind of person that is comfortable hanging out with two other people who barely know each other, don’t really get to know each other, but who drink a bunch of wine together, smoke a bunch of smokes, drive around aimlessly, learn nothing new and come to terms with nothing.
Some people could read that and think “you’ve just described most of the time I’ve done anything in my life, but only the mundane parts”. Well, you wouldn’t be wrong. This is like the depressed, middle-aged version of the kind of story that, with young people, results in something like Before Sunrise, an energetic and ecstatic meeting of two joyful souls who just want to eat up life and each other in the pursuit of wonderment.
But with middle-aged people…
It’s two lost souls swimming around in the same part of the fishbowl awhile, before they go their separate ways again.
There needs to be a place for this kind of cinema. Even if it does seem to be the perfect representation of what people mock about pretentious European arthouse cinema.
And then we all waved goodbye.
7 times how fucking romantic out of 10
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“What are you carrying?”
- “I’ll tell you, but you have to promise that you won’t tell it anywhere.” - Magnetic Fields
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