Poor Things: Greece yet to develop mindset to deal as equals with EU decision-makers

The award of the top prize, Golden Lion, at the Venice Film Festival last month to Greek-born director Yorgos Lanthimos for the film Poor Things was also an Irish-Greek triumph, since the film, like three of Lanthimos’s earlier works, was produced by Irish company Element Pictures, with photography director Robbie Ryan.

Element’s Ed Guiney called Lanthimos “incredible, incomparable”, which is a fair tribute to a director whose visionary approach to film-making embraces storyline, environment, actors and crew.

I say “Greek-born” because, professionally speaking, Lanthimos has outgrown his Greek roots in order to achieve Hollywood-level success with films like Lobster (starring Colin Farrell) and The Favourite, which won Grand Jury prize at Venice in 2018 and was nominated in no fewer than 10 categories for the Oscars.

This evolution was probably inevitable, since, as Lanthimos puts it, the industry is a “complicated and expensive artform”, which Greece cannot support. But he has not lost the sense of “spontaneity and freedom” with which he made his first outstanding films, Dogtooth, Alpes and Kinetta.

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The Lanthimos who made Dogtooth has not gone away. He has simply transported his vision of despair, emptiness, passions and madness from a smaller canvas to a larger one. His films are irreverent, questioning, even anarchic, rejecting conventional values and assumptions.

[ Venice film festival: Irish-produced Poor Things wins top Golden Lion award ]

[ Poor Things first-look review: Emma Stone has never been better, and a moustache-twirling Mark Ruffalo has a ball ]

Poor Things, starring Emma Stone, depicts a woman’s epic journey towards self-discovery and liberation. “Our protagonist is a woman to whom we are trying to give back the freedom that we have deprived her of.” Lanthimos describes her journey as expressing “spontaneous freedom”, which echoes precisely the atmosphere in which he honed his own skills as a director in Greece.

The same day that the Golden Lion award was announced, Kathimerini newspaper carried an opinion piece by a Greek American, John Mazis, which spoke of “the absence and ineffectiveness of the Greek state”, asking “is Greece a modern European country or is it a failed state?” His question is more far-ranging than the current situation occasioned by natural disasters.

He was referring to a country where successive governments, including the newly elected New Democracy, have missed out on the joined-up thinking which an EU member state needs to stand on its own feet.

That same day, Kathimerini also carried a headline – “One in every three households struggling”. The report detailed “severe material and social deprivation”, especially in meeting day-to-day basic needs.

Mazis, a historian, has written eloquently of Ion Dragoumis, the politician assassinated in 1920, who recognised the need for “Westernisation” but warned that Greece should not be obliged to relinquish its eastern characteristics. Subsequent governments seem to have ignored Dragoumis’s warning, concentrating on what has too often been a subservient attitude to Europe and the United States.

The “Greek Weird Wave”, as Lanthimos’ films have been described generically, could well represent the economic and social disturbances of his homeland over the past 15 years, which has seen almost insurmountable crises in the economy, refugees, political instability and a continuing downward spiral in the quality of life, especially for young people.

[ Greek bond yields drop below UK as euro zone crisis memories recede ]

[ Greece shows how sovereignty is an illusion for most modern nations ]

One massive factor in the Greek economy is unpaid taxes. It is estimated that the tax shortfall each year is €8 billion in uncollected taxes, with a cumulative €142 billion, due principally because self-employed people and corporations submit false annual tax returns.

Where a public servant (a teacher, postman, policeman, hospital doctor) has an average takehome pay of €850 a month, the vast majority of self-employed claim to live on less than that, if their tax returns are to be believed. Less than 1 per cent of self-employed admit to an income of more than €100,000.

Since tax evasion is so widespread, indirect taxes (on foodstuffs, books, travel) account for an unacceptable 60 per cent of exchequer receipts – far above the European average – placing an extra burden at the checkout on already-distraught households of taxpayers. Eurostat recently reported that Greeks work 41 hours a week, more than any other Europeans (the average is 37.5 hours) but are third from the bottom of 38 countries in terms of salary levels. And it has the second-lowest employment rate in Europe. “Poor Things” indeed.

Greece has only just emerged from a 12-year surveillance by the International Monetary Fund. But its economic crisis has shown graphically that, while it has modernised in many ways, it has yet to develop an intellectual mindset which could permit it to engage on an equal footing with the decision-makers in the EU. It remains a client, ancillary. Like Greece’s credit ratings, as Lanthimos says, “a film has to be approved abroad before getting acknowledged in Greece”.