Whether the title of Ferdinando Cito Filomarino’s Beckett is a reference to the author of Waiting for Godot is difficult to say, but one decidedly Beckettian moment occurs just a few minutes into the film. On a romantic vacation in Greece, Beckett (John David Washington) and April (Alicia Vikander) are eating spanakopita and flirting at a mountaintop inn when she offhandedly describes the two of them as “figures in a landscape.”
This enigmatic phrase, suggestive of the artifice and alienation that mark Samuel Beckett’s writings, also happens to resonate with Filomarino’s unorthodox approach to the thriller genre. It’s the background that stands out in Beckett, so much so that it can be viewed as a study of the Greek landscape—not only natural but urban and political—with a thriller mapped onto it. It’s an organic progression for Filomarino in light of his work as a second unit director for Beckett producer Luca Guadagnino, most notably on A Bigger Splash and the remake of Suspiria, two films in which the background threatens to subsume the foreground.
Plotwise, Beckett contains more than a heaping spoonful of the Tintinesque—a stranger in a strange land is embroiled in an international conspiracy, leading to chase sequences across exotic locales—with many of the pleasures and pitfalls that this entails. It all kicks off when Beckett falls asleep at the wheel of his and April’s rental car, crashing it into a farmhouse and killing her outright. Though Vikander gets less than 15 minutes of screen time, she and Washington sketch out a relationship in its early stages—promising despite the pressures of travel aggravating differences in temperament—so convincingly that you really feel the weight of her loss. This is critical in fleshing out Beckett, who in certain respects doesn’t conform to the thriller hero archetype, experiencing at least two panic attacks in the course of the film.
When he returns in a fit of guilt to the scene of the crash, a police officer, Xenakis (Panos Koronis), and a strange woman (Lena Kitsopoulou) start shooting at him without explanation. He spends the rest of the film in a fight for survival that takes him from the countryside to the streets of Athens circa the 2009 financial crisis, where unrest is about to boil over. Again and again, he runs up against the language barrier. And along the way, he gets help from a pair of activists, Lena (Vicky Krieps) and Thalia (Daphne Alexander), who tell him that the cops are in cahoots with a fascist organization called Sunrise (a thinly veiled Golden Dawn). He makes it to the U.S. embassy, only to find that it’s not the haven that he assumed it to be, when a sinister diplomat, Tynan (Boyd Holbrook), tries to take him right back to the police.
Just underneath all that, there’s landscape, then cityscape. The film charts a progression from temple ruins among forbidding mountain crags, through crumbling train stations, to the claustrophobic alleyways and parking garages of an Athens falling back into ruin—from the ancient, through the modern, to the not-so-distant past. Over the course of the film, the stark whiteness of the buildings is increasingly saturated with graffiti. The plot may be a tourist’s nightmare, but there’s an undeniably touristic quality to the cinematography here. At the same time, Filomarino seamlessly integrates the scenery with the action set pieces, as if the locations inspired the choreography of the chase, rather than the other way around. Behind the images themselves, a largely percussion-based soundtrack provides nervy atmospherics.
The back half of the film is dominated by scenes of mass demonstration and rioting as politics overflows into the cityscape. In one shot, a line of police, drumming their truncheons against their riot shields, resembles nothing so much as a phalanx of hoplites, while Beckett struggles against the current of the crowd. Though frequently dwarfed by the landscape or swept up in events, Beckett stands out, as a lone black man in foreign land, against the white mountains, white buildings, and white people that surround him. It’s thanks to this kind of tug of war between background and foreground that Beckett succeeds as a piece of entertainment, which can also reflect the political instability and polarization of recent years.
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