Yorgos Symeoforidis is the character and Yorgos Symeonidis is the actor who plays him—just one sign of this Greek drama’s annoying, some might say marvelous, sense of ambiguity. When Yorgos emerges from prison, audiences don’t notice the man so much as the prison bars he walks behind, and when he takes a bus to a day center for former prisoners, a cemetery hangs noticeably in the background, hungry for our attention.
Throughout the film, writer-director Thanos Anastopoulos self-consciously thrills in propping Yorgos near gates and spiderwebs, strained poetic expressions of the man’s presumably crippling sense of entrapment, but what’s the story with Mr. Gloom? Stray bits of dialogue hint at the conflict between Albanians and Greeks, and when a recent murder dredges up the memory of a man who was killed by “football freaks” years ago, it becomes clear that the woman (Ornela Kapetani) whose life Yorgos is attempting to ingratiate himself into may actually not be his own wife but that of the dead man’s.
But, then, it still isn’t clear how Yorgos is involved in the man’s death or if Yorgos is even Greek: Because he says his name with trepidation, one gleans that Yorgos is either ashamed of his Greek identity or the Albanian one he left behind. Though it’s interesting how the story uses ambiguity to get at how racism is sometimes more than skin deep, Anastopoulos’s other means of drumming up suspense are less forgivable. Where other films suffocate audiences with exposition, Correction delights in providing none, which can be just as shrill when you know a character, like Kapetani’s, could very easily put an end to the story’s mystery tour by simply telling her daughter why Yorgos is creepily stalking them.
Anastopoulos’s style doesn’t help. He locks background and foreground planes in stringent lockstep, conveying capital-d Distance in a way that doesn’t seem to really connect with or shape the story, though it does mirror its passive-aggressiveness. Half the time you expect an appearance by the ghost of Antonioni—or a cameo by Nuri Bilge Ceylan.
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