"Lefteris means free... free as a bird"
Missolonghi. New Year's Eve. Panayotis knocks on the front door of his friend Lefteris Dimakopoulos. They haven't seen each other for a long time. On the threshold of a new year, they reminisce about the past, the years that have gone by, the years when they were students, the years of youthful loves and youthful hopes.
LEFTERIS DIMAKOPOULOS is the story of fifteen years in the life of a "bright" young man. They are the years when he changes, when he loses his values and his youth only to realise, on this New Year's Eve that he has sacrificed one life for the right to acquire yet another.
In his first full-length feature film Pericles Hoursoglou follows his hero's race towards a dubious success with an austere, almost documentary style that allows him to remain aloof from the events as though he does not wish to comment on them but merely to record them. His hero is a modern Greek, a modern citizen of the western world trying to maintain his equilibrium. In the first part of the film the fire of the quest burns everything. In the second, he is swallowed up by Lefteris Dimakopoulos' methodical, almost voluntary descent into the "rock of his future". A descent that is dark, sad, like the longing for adolescence and lost innocence. |