OXI, An Act of Resistance, 2014.
Directed by Ken McMullen.
Starring Gabriella Wright, Alexis Georgopoulou, Eleni Kallia and Dominique Pinon.
SYNOPSIS:
A documentary essay linking classical Greek texts with the financial crisis in that same country over two and a half millenia later.
OXI, An Act of Resistnace. That’s a nice subtitle. It sounds like that really well received documentary that was released last year, An Act of Killing. That was conventionally groundbreaking, making war criminals restage the acts that defined them.
But it’s an ambigious title. From the name alone, it’s difficult to know what you’re in for. After watching the film, you’d be little wiser. Frustrated, maybe, with a collection of mildly interesting quotations from Classical Greece, but not genuinely wiser.
The main narrative strand is of Sphinx (Gabriella Wright), an author, who is rewriting Oedipus Rex. A gentleman called the Investigator (played by Dominique Pinon, or ‘That Man With The Fun Face From All Jean-Paul Jeurnet’s Early Films’) pursues her for defaming the original’s integrity. Tangentially to this story, the film randomly darts off into either a) present day Greeks talking about the state of their country, b) actors performing scenes from classical Greek plays, or b) annoying slow camera pans of a beach.
The underlying message is that these Greek works that were written over 2500 years ago – the same ones that Spinx is rewriting – echo and comment on concerns and themes in the present day. The tools for our salvation are hidden in the lessons of the past. Little is spoken, however, of the fall of Greece, Socrates being sentenced to death or the exiling of Aritstotle. A fetishisation of the classical world is rampant throughout.
Nonetheless, there’s something in that sentiment. If only the film took it’s own advice. At one point, The Investigator questions an acting troupe. Why are you performing these sacred texts in colloquial Greek? In the same way as Sphinx, they intend to make these works more accessible to a modern audience. The Investigator snorts pompously, a bumbling character that the movie portrays with ridicule. Why, then, would you shroud your own message in a cacophony of different languages, painfully wooden stagings of classical plays and the aforementioned annoying slow camera pans of a beach? Pretentious, overly-academic and impentrable. There’s an unintentional hypocrisy here.
This is not to say the film is without merit. There exists the occasional island of revelation. A nice quote here; an animated, aging academic there. But they are too sparse to save the film from drowning in its own intellectual self-abroption. Tedious, tiring stuff.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film ★ / Movie ★
Oliver Davis is one of Flickering Myth’s co-editors. You can follow him on Twitter (@OliDavis)
Originally published October 16, 2014. Updated November 28, 2022.
