Pity (2018)

Director: Babis Makridis

Screenplay: Babis Makridis and Efthymis Filippou

Cast: Yannis Drakopoulos, Evi Saoulidou, Nota Tserniafski, Makis Papadimitriou

Synopsis: With his wife (Evi Saoulidou) in a coma, a lawyer (Yannis Drakopoulos) is dealing with his grief. However, it becomes apparent that, through the attention he gets and the effect it has, he's addicted to pity, making his life awkward when he doesn't get his own morbid way.

At the beginning, Pity comes off as a morose, dirge-like story about death - a man whose wife is near death in a coma, coupled with black screens filled of bleak tragic odes about morality. Something's amiss though, and when it becomes apparent the text's the obsessive ramblings of our, the structure of the film even playing with the viewer, then things go amiss. It's not surprising really, being a Greek Weird Wave film from Yorgos Lanthimos' former screenwriter Efthymis Filippou and director/co-writer Babis Makridis, so something was bound to become perverse. It's a film that feels not as bold as those films before in this movement of Greek cinema, but unlike Chevalier (2015) which really felt like this movement repeating itself, this particular entry is still an intriguing curiosity.

That sense of the films of before in this moment being repeated is clear. The minimal camera movement and long takes a common reoccurrence among the Greek Weird Wave films; Greece's atmosphere, I realise, of bright Mediterranean light has the unexpected effect on white, modernist environments of a septic plainness, as much the ill ease you experience from these films the unexpected fear found in Dulux pure white or light cream wall paint. Banal everyday interaction is turned into a breeding ground of uncomfortable recesses in people, in this case this central character needing to be grieving to function, or probably the truth, an egotistic addiction for despair. He, even when his wife is okay, midway through fully recovering, will deliberately lie to the guy at the Laundromat for pity that she's at death's door, and after a female neighbour did the kindest of things by giving him and his son cakes in pity to every morning, he starts being the creepy stalker neighbour back at her door demanding more cake.

It is a lot more subdued for the most part than other Greek Weird Wave films. The lawyer's vindictiveness is found in pettier ways even next to compatriots in films like Dogtooth (2009); upon hearing one of Mozart's joyful piano sonatas, sabotages his son's piano so only discordant cords can be played, preferring his own joyless and portentous dirge about death instead. It does end more conventionally, bloodshed as he even dumps the pet dog in the middle of the sea, which could be seen as the one moment that the film does fail when it could've been a better work by taking another direction. Everything before that point plays into a perverse mocking of a patriarch whose melodramatic attitude to the ritual of grief is a dark one, particularly as, barring the one influence he has in power as a lawyer, he's a little man who Yannis Drakopoulos plays as a quiet, somewhat pathetic figure in his thick rimmed glasses and manner, only a problematic one in how obsessed he is. Even early on, when you still view Pity as a serious film, how he describes how crying in films is rarely real and talks about an American boxing film, there's an inherently obsessive air to his monotone which becomes both hilarious in a sick way but gives way to an actual psychosis.

The other question to ask is Pity's point. Alongside this parody of patriarchal behaviour, there is a disturbing notion that death and tragedy can be relished in modern culture its clearly stabbing at - some arts do so for transgression, but Pity surprisingly can be compared to the American horror-comedy Tragedy Girls (2017), as the older father to a movie where two women perpetrate murders whilst playing traumatised bystanders whose grief makes them online sensations. Babis Makridis' film is a stranger version, as the character has literally become an addict and one who already seems to have been with psychological problems beforehand, one of the various figures screenwriter Efthymis Filippou has written who have pathological obsessions. A lawyer, his obsession is worse as he can grasp onto a client's grief over her father being murdered, the first twig of Pity having a black humour fully when he tries to see if (with the help of his female secretary) whether a blood curdling scream can be heard over a heavy metal song. From changing his office picture on the wall to a ship wreck to an egregious, spiteful act of injustice in court, his need afterwards when things don't go his way becomes more insidious as he now harms other. It makes the actual bloodshed for the ending, referencing one talked of involving a BMX bicycle at the crime scene, unneeded as it already reached an absurdity that could've gone in a different, unique direction. (Besides, if a broad moment to be included for the film, using tear gas on himself in a closed room to cause himself to cry is unique to say the least). That doesn't detract from the film in the slightest, merely a sour note to Pity's virtues.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Grotesque/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

Personal Opinion:

There is a danger that the Greek Weird Wave of cinema is going to fall into clichés and predictability as it continues, but even a lesser film like Pity still continues the sickly humorous, uncomfortable satire that made the moment originally. Even as Yorgos Lanthimos somehow now had an Oscar nomination for Best Director for Rachel Weisz spouting obscenities, those still in his homeland are finding (probably disturbingly) a lot of festering wounds in human behaviour to still pick at.

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