Ulysses' Gaze (1995)

When I was 16, Ulysses' Gaze (dir. Angelopoulos) was a great film. You know, profound. Re-watching it a bunch of years later proved to be excruciating (and very, very boring). Oh. My. God. This film tries so hard to be deep, to be pensive, to provide an overarching story about Europe, the fate of Europe, and the nature of man, grief and love and loss and memory and ... well, post-communist regimes looking for a path. Angelopoulos' film is spelled EPIC and that's part of the problem.  Harvey Keitel tries his best, and Erland Jospehsson is sympathetic, it's just that the film's grandiose aspiration is bound to fail. And it fails. This is not to say that all scenes fall flat - the image of the gigantic Lenin statue drifting on a barge is beautiful. Most of the time the dialogue is heavy-handed, the sweeping and slow cinematography seems derivative and the perspective of the entire film appears to be quite self-righteous - a film about the magnificence of cinema, the mystery and enigma of the moving image; but I never feel that I grasp anything essential about cinema - what happens is that I get annoyed by the pretentiousness and self-indulgence of the film (which has not to do with its being slow or inaccessible). The story has several levels. On the concrete level, it's about a guy who travels from country to country looking for a few reels of early cinema. But the story is also about the fate of the Balkans, Greece, nationalism, war, the past. // It is easy to think of directors who have the skills and power of attention to create a stunning scene out of a seemingly haphazard or commonplace situation. Angelopoulos works in the opposite direction. His scenes are composed to the extent that they appear stifled. There is no life left in them, they are weighed down by the desperate quest for MEANING. Roger Ebert awarded the film with one star. "A director must be very sure of his greatness to inflict an experience like this on the audience...." // This is the kind of film where EVERY SINGLE female person is attracted to this elusive main character A (as in Angelopoulos) - after two minutes in the company of this man who moves around like a zombie and talks in quasi-poetic mumblings, all of these women's hearts start throbbing for this guy; everywhere he goes, women's secret and innermost emotions are unleashed. zZzZ.