Digger Review: Nature Brings Generational Tension to the Surface in Neo-Western

Georgis Grigorakis’s Digger emphasizes a minor but resonant detail that reveals the characters’ conflicting assumptions about the world. Nikitas (Vangelis Mourikis), a farmer living in isolation on a mountain tract in rural northern Greece, is forever scratching between his shoulder blades at an itch. After his adult son, Johnny (Argyris Pandazaras), shows up on a motorbike to claim his share of the property, which had belonged to Nikita’s recently deceased ex-wife, he notices his father scratching. Nikitas blames it on a tick, but Johnny insists that it’s just a mole, that he has one in the same spot on his back.

Like his fellow villagers, Nikitas is under mounting pressure to sell his property to the mining company that’s moved into town. As such, he’s predisposed to view the irritation in his back as a parasite digging into his flesh to suck his lifeblood, just as the mining strips the land of its abundance. But Johnny, as an outsider, doesn’t share his obstinate father’s antagonistic relationship to the miners. In fact, he’s desperately in need of the wages that they’re offering in exchange for wholesale despoilation. The itch is a phantom as far as he’s concerned, a benign defect that he’s inherited along with his father’s stubbornness and half his property.

With its motorbikes standing in for horses and its self-reliant homesteader protagonist, Digger is hardly subtle in its refurbishment of the archetypal industry-comes-to-town story that’s familiar from so many revisionist westerns, like McCabe & Mrs. Miller. It also borrows from such films a demythologizing pessimism and overtones of anti-capitalism.

Throughout Grigorakis’s film, cinematographer Giorgos Karvelas’s camera dwells on faces eloquent for their silence and mountainsides drenched in gloom. Transformed into wastelands by large-scale mineral extraction, the Greek landscape might almost be mistaken for the mythic West, or even the surface of an alien planet. But the filmmakers never let the viewer forget that these used to be forested ridges where chestnuts supplied local markets for centuries. In long shot, the mining equipment dwarfs its operators and, even when off screen, periodically fills the soundtrack with bursts of sinister, ever-encroaching noise.

As Nikitas teaches Johnny what he knows of husbanding the forest, their mutual suspicion diminishes, and in a pivotal scene, the out-of-focus photography and use of slow-motion impart a sense of time slowing to a serene trickle among the trees. In return, Johnny uses his skills as a mechanic to repair his father’s chainsaw, the grinding motor of which sounds identical to that of a motorbike. When Johnny and a local barkeep, Mary (Sofia Kokkali), fall for each other, Nikitas offers what passes for his blessing. But after Johnny succumbs to temptation and signs on with the mining company, theirs becomes the archetypal clash between father and son, age and youth, old and new, idealism and cynicism. In the end, though, Grigorakis’s ecological and humanist sympathies lie squarely with Nikitas.

The film comes off as heavy-handed in some of its themes, but it makes up for that with expressive cinematography, the complexity of its characters, and an unexpectedly nuanced take on technology. The filmmakers clearly want the viewer, like Johnny and Mary, to think of motorbikes as sexy, the ride of choice for a kind of 21st-century outlaw. And Digger’s ending shows how machines that can ravage a forest can also save a life, that our tools are no better than their operators, but also no worse. Grigorakis’s film may not revolutionize the western genre by transposing it to an unlikely setting, but it doesn’t dilute it either.