
This poster heroically says nothing about the movie
(Ο Άνθρωπος του Θεού)
dir: Yelena Popovic
2021
It’s…strange. My path to tracking down and watching this flick is an odd one. A few weeks ago I watched a Greek film called Apples about a world where people get amnesia spontaneously but still have to get on with their lives, which wasn’t that world-shaking, but had a guy in the central role who was a bit interesting.
And then I saw that he had another film that came out in 2021, and thought that I would give that a go.
It’s actually (mostly, 99 per cent) in English, despite the setting and the nationality of most of the actors. It’s about a Greek Orthodox saint, which I can’t imagine a lot of people who don’t already speak Greek could possibly care about. And it’s set in the 1890s which, I dunno, is it a decade that has a lot of diehard fans? I mean, I know the kids of today are strangely and offputtingly fixated on the 1990s, which I find very disconcerting, especially because I was there, and remember what we did back then, but I struggle to imagine the audience that could exist for something about a religious weirdo from over a century ago.
So, well. Films don’t have to have built-in audiences for my purposes, because I’m not an investor, or a hedge fund manager, or in fact anyone with enough money to invest in icy poles. I care if I enjoy a film or not, and then I think about why afterwards.
There is something compelling about the character study provided here (rather than the biopic aspects). Arvis Servetalis, as Nectarios of Aegina, gives a very committed performance as the saint, played as a man who so completely believes what he preaches that the other members of the Greek Orthodox Church (literally referred to as the Patriarchy, I’m not making that up) fear and resent him. Because he’s not into his faith solely for the accumulation of wealth, and actually wants to help people, however high he rises, he inspires hatred in the other priests because they fear he’ll give the Church’s wealth away to those who really need it.
The film starts off in Alexandria, Egypt, with there being a guy, a priest, well, actually more like the equivalent of a bishop (a metropolite, as he is referred to in the movie), who is beloved by everyone who he comes into contact with, absolutely everyone except, you guessed it, the other priests and metropolites, especially. These men with flowing beards and awesome headgear sit around plotting against him. The main reason is that they fear that, because Nectarios is so awesome, and because so many people adore him, that he’d be a shoo-in to be the next Patriarch of Alexandria.
What is a Patriarch? He’s not just an old guy, or someone’s daddy, or a paid up member of a misogynistic system striving every day to make the world a worse place for girls and women everywhere. He’s like a pope to those who follow the Orthodox faith. The conniving priests dread the idea of Nectarios becoming Patriarch and potentially giving away all their wealth. All their clothing with gold thread in it, which surely was Jesus’s plan all along.
I don’t know if that was his actual plan, but who knows? He seems more hellbent on praying in painful ways, and helping everyone he can with whatever they need. Help moving furniture? Sure. A quick blessing and prayer to stave off illness? Absolutely! Need convincing that the problem isn’t that Jesus doesn’t love you, but that you don’t believe you’re worthy, and act to prove yourself right? Nectarios is here to calmly explain why you’re wrong, and how once you think about it more clearly, and trust in Christ, and trust in yourself enough to believe in His love, well, then, everything will be hunky dory, even if your foot just fell off due to leprosy.
No wonder they hate him: This man is Ned Flanders made flesh and blood.
The other metropolites get him kicked out of Egypt, such is their loathing for him, and where’s a Greek priesty type to go other than Athens, where I’ve heard there are a fair few Greeks?
Every door is closed to him. No-one wants to help, or even listen to him, even for a few seconds. Mate, I know how you feel, I’ve been to Athens too. Nothing’s changed in over a hundred years.
It’s almost comical how little people want to help him. And yet, he sits next to a down-and-out chap, and they chat for a while, one human to another, and then he notices the guy doesn’t have shoes.
“Take mine. I have another pair”, and just puts them on his feet.
Like, I don’t know if he was so holy that he just miraculously knew that they would just fit on the other guy’s feet, but this is the man he is.
Still, all doors remain closed. No one will offer him a parish, or even let him ‘work’ for bread as a travelling preacher. When he tries to fix things up at a government office, they tell him technically he’s not Greek, because he was born in a place that’s no longer considered Greek, being somewhere in Turkey.
As if things weren’t bad enough. Not only are the ecclesiastical jerks in Alexandria still slandering him all over the place, probably even writing nasty things about him on the backs of toilet stall doors, but he isn’t even considered Greek. He is effectively stateless.
Even a living saint like this chap can only bear so much. We see many scenes where, though his faith never wavers, he beseeches the Lord to give him the strength to go on through adversity. He never doubts The Jesus: He sometimes doubts himself.
They throw him a bone by sending him to an island called Evia that no other priest wants to go to, and he tries his best but the fuckers from Alexandria somehow keep convincing these hicks that he’s the devil himself. From the look of the congregation (five angry farmer types), I’m not even sure they can read.
But the fix is in, like it always is, and somehow everyone is still being manipulated from afar. Spooky action at a distance, I think it is. Malign, malignant whispers from the unholy.
But it’s not Satan doing it, it’s not Rupert Murdoch, it’s not the Koch Brothers; it’s not the Turks, it’s not Muslims, it’s not even one of the various Christian sects or Protestants etc. It’s not even bloody Catholics: it’s other Greek Orthodox jerks hounding him to his grave.
Eventually he’s given the thankless (again) task of looking after a school that has part of its student body as religious students potentially studying to become priests, but also a whole other section that’s meant to be non-religious, or at least secular studies. The guy who seems like, I dunno, either the actual principal or someone who based his performance on the stereotype of the gruff and always angry police chief who’s always giving his greatest detective a loud bollocking every chance he can get, keeps yelling at Nectarios about how’s he’s doing everything wrong, all of the time.
And what is Nectarios doing? He’s living his pious life. He takes responsibility for everything, literally improves the school with his own hands, leads by example, never complains, never defends himself, cleans the toilets in order to prevent a sick cleaner from getting fired, takes on the punishments that were to be meted out to quarrelling students onto himself in order to shame them with his willingness to take on their suffering.
Generally he’s being the most Christ-like person any of these shmucks have ever seen.
Naturally, this inspires rage. The other principal guy literally tells Nectarios how much he dislikes him, but he eventually confesses to him as to why he prompts these feelings of frustration and disgust: the fact that Nectarios believes so unwaveringly, so completely, only reminds him of his own doubts, and the many ways in which he himself falls so short.
I haven’t said anything about the performances themselves, and, well, there’s probably a good reason for that. The vast majority of the film is in English, and many of these actors are not usually acting in English – they’re Greek, for crying out loud. The central performance is the kind of one that had Daniel Day Lewis or Eddie Redmayne or Benedict Cumberbatch, or basically any Anglo-Saxon white actor given it, it would have been awards city. But, because Aris Servetalis is hardly a household name, and likely never will be, his performance probably went unheralded outside of Greece, if at all.
Which is a shame because he gives a very committed performance, with his otherworldly monotone and his haunted eyes, that only get more haunted as the film goes on.
And I haven’t even mentioned Mickey Rourke. Mickey Rourke is in this fucking movie for some reason. It’s a short scene, but wow.
Also a massive surprise is hearing the trademark voice of Australian singer Lisa Gerrard on parts of the soundtrack, who I haven’t heard in a while. There was a time when films couldn’t be released if they didn’t have at least a few moments of Lisa Gerrard’s warblings on the soundtrack.
My feelings about this film aren’t complicated, even if my relationship with religious crap (and my own background, history etc) is extremely complicated. In truth, I loathe organised religion, and don’t really play favourites between the big ones. I have an especial, specific and bone deep loathing of the Catholic Church, for its list of crimes as long as its history. And while I loathe the deep-seeded misogyny, homophobia and open racism of the Orthodox version, that doesn’t mean that I am immune from feeling deep feelings about the few actual good people that believed as well, and tried to build things like nunneries or schools whose purpose was to help people, and not the usual purpose of fleecing them like the sheep that they are.
I feel pretty certain that were there more people that acted like St Nectarios in the Christian crime caper, and less like, say, Cardinal fucking George Pell (long may he burn in the fires of a hell of his own creation), I’d have far less of a problem with Christianity specifically and religion generally than I do.
People, religious people who actually believe and actually walk the walk, rather than the ones that use it for cover in order to be selfish, awful (and in some cases, like Pell’s, utterly monstrous, having harmed so many children, having harmed so many families), are compelling to us, because regardless of which faith they’re talking about, it calls all of us to a higher purpose beyond our own self-aggrandisement. That there is something outside of us worth working on, not just our own empty “self-improvement”.
Man of God is a very straightforward film, shot mostly in tight close ups with handheld cameras, especially with Nectarios, perhaps to emphasise how close he is to God (or perhaps how claustrophobic it is to be a true believer), and it has perhaps an almost unbelievable level of adversity faced by one man, in order to overcome his demons, and ours too. But it really works.
It’s a reminder that some people are the real deal.
Even if, you know, there’s no invisible guy in the sky, and it’s all bullshit.
8 times such a life of asceticism and abstinence – yeah it’s definitely not for me – out of 10
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“I'm starting to think that you're not human." - Man of God
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