At the Greek and Italian Film Festivals - Janice Tong embraces a Trilogy: Life's Labyrinths, Part 1 - ATHENS MIDNIGHT RADIO (Renos Haralambidis, Greece, 2024)

The voyage back from the far side of a metaphoric world had taken almost a year through a fogged maze of days and hours undone. Throughout, I have been an impersonator of the small-spirited and bumbling adventurer Phileas Fogg (courtesy of a recent viewing of the comic and alarming meteoric talent of one David Tennant), and suffice to say, it was not only in name that we were equals. This year of quiet unassuming mourning where films were watched unnoticed, passed me by with a meandering haze of interceding narratives that neither yielded joy nor nostalgia. In fact, I had not noticed much but for a lack of appetite. 

 The Italian Film Festival changed all that. Maybe it was time, too. I had selected more than seven films to be watched (managing only three in the end), I did, however, include the great Visconti’s Death in Venice in the same season – this other film, newly restored, was screening at the Ritz in Randwick and nicely complemented the three films. And ending this period of weekend film-going with a poetic, lyrical and infinitely beautiful film from the Greek Film Festival (first time attendee to this one), Athens Midnight Radio. And it is with this film – and the end of my chapter of disquiet – where I shall begin. 

Renos Haralambidis, Athens Midnight Radio

Nyhterinos ekfonitis | Athens Midnight Radio 

Written and directed by Renos Haralambidis, who also plays the main protagonist in the film, a lovelorn late night radio announcer who is about to celebrate his fiftieth birthday on air. This film is pretty much a one-hander and Haralambidis carries it off magnificently. Part recollection, part reflection, on the unrelenting onset of time; this is the announcer’s call into the darkness – for a return to love, to youth, and perhaps to the better days already missed, those long gone years. With this, he has cast a message in a bottle, and set it adrift in a vast ocean of the unknown. His one wish – to be reunited, on air, off air, into the distance of the night – with a love he’d let go a long time ago. He has given her the duration of his session to get back in contact, to call in if she happens to be listening. 

So this night is a story crafted in memories of his youth, where the city’s glorious ancient monuments, tokens of his lover’s meeting spots, and the music, a nostalgic signalling of lost days – many beautiful pieces, especially the repeated aria from The Pearl Fishers, Je Crois Entendre Encore (I Think I Hear Again), differently rendered each time. And at each hour, passed-time was marked through its announcement by an analogue tape recording (a hark back to ancient Hellenistic days where the hours of the night were announced via water clocks). 

Contributing to this film’s hypnotic quality is Haralambidis’ sonorous midnight voice, like a confessional, this internal monologue is sometimes punctuated by music, sometimes by callers into the radio station, and sometimes, most memorably, by the recordings of messages left by his lover on his answer phone. In this way, Haralambidis invites us into not only his personal history and desires but also identifies to us his current mood: as a man of nostalgia; we immediately understand that he is a collector of songs, for the messages have a musicality of their own. 

The characters, although unnamed (and probably because they are unnamed) made their love story infinitely relatable. The anonymity a city like Athens offers is depicted none more clearly than in the scenes of the midnight marathon runners preparing for their race, the warm up exercises were shown in close-ups: the back of heads (one with headphones in place), fragments of limbs, arms, hands, feet – as though preparing the viewer for those other fragments, sculptures of Greek gods, and monumental ruins like the ever-watchful Acropolis, that featured prominently throughout the film. Kostas Gikas’ cinematography paints the city in slow motion, the quiet city released from tourists and workers commands our eyes, paired with a soundtrack (provided by the radio announcer) demands our ears’ attention too. Even a remembered ‘performance’ from an isolated phone booth brought out a sense of yearning, nostalgic for a youth long gone, for a simpler way of life. 

This film is also Haralambidis’ love story to Athens. As the night paints its stars across the sky, the narrative illuminates and awakens the secrets long buried there. In what seems to be another life, the announcer was once an Evzone, part of a light infantry that stands guard at monuments. In recalling its elaborate handover parade, which for me at least, has always been a curious mix of choreography, solemnity and discipline. This sentiment and tone matches perfectly the magnificent, but silent monuments standing sentinels across the city in sleep, where the vanished lover of his youth, a dancer, leaps and twirls across these landscapes. The most touching scenes were those where she had danced in front of him. First at Syntagma Square in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier where he was stationed. At the time, even her beautiful grand jetés were unable to stir his heart, marking the place where their love story began to unravel. And now, in a dreamscape, and Haralambidis with eyes closed, reclined against the sublime fragments from the East Pediment of the Parthenon, were of Demeter (whose skirts he leant against) and Persephone, and Dionysus nearby, all in a kind of limbo and frozen in action. 

These replica sculptures located at the Acropolis metro station in Athens are mute, as though their stories, currently voiceless, are asking to be discovered – slow mirage-like sequences where everyday workers pass by these works, and the sleeping Haralambidis, unseen. Whilst his lover, a ballet dancer, portrayed wonderfully by Eleftheria Stamou, a dancer herself with Greek National Opera Ballet, is as alluring and mysterious as these ancient gods, and as graceful as Athens, her city, especially when dawn breaks. 

Does he get to reunite with her? This dream lover? You’ll have to watch the film to find out. Perhaps the mood and meaning of this film is best described by Haralambidis in his own words: “I always appreciate Athens as a city where you can be in the arms of eternity as trains go by and also amongst the crowds, which come and go, as if indifferent to these surroundings. And it is in the underground of the city's metro, at the Acropolis metro station where the exhibit of the replicas of the statues of the eastern gable end of the Parthenon, that I discovered the stars for my new film Athens Midnight Radio.” 

This quote is from a beautiful short article on the website of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles where Haralambidis speaks eloquently about his film and Athens. 

 The Greek Film Festival ran in October in Australia this year. 

The Italian Film Festival ran in September and October in Australia this year. 

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 Look out for the next instalments coming soon, on La Grazia by director Paolo Sorrentino and Il tempo che ci vuole | The Time it Takes by Francesca Comencini