I skoni tou hronou (Theodoros Angelopoulos, 2008)

Angelopoulos's death in 2012 meant that this trilogy centering on modern Greece was never completed, and so the esteemed director's career unfortunately fizzles out with a damp squib. The trademark painterly photography is still in evidence as a filmmaker traces the life of his Greek communist mother across decades and countries, but The Dust of Time is a listless telling of a story which has to be passionate, with characters repeating hopelessly stilted lines when not struck dumb by the symbolism of it all, sleepwalking from scene to scene. The location shifts from nation to nation to little purpose, like those restaurants that do eight different national cuisines and all of them badly, the last resort of many an artist bereft of ideas, i.e. reeling off places and global events in the vain hope that their names alone will lend some meaning. Willem Dafoe, a serial culprit in reverence of directorial sacred cows, does his usual open-mouthed hand-wringing, Bruno Ganz looks lost and falls back on inappropriate avuncularity and Irene Jacob, as the mother, is quite stunningly wooden. Only one scene, with the recollections of an old man related through sound and dialogue as if they were current and real around him, rather than the standard recourse to flashbacks, hints at what the director was capable of at the height of his powers.

4/10