Still life
Nikos Panayiotopoulos’s film «Beautiful People» does not even echo Godard (The Sad Irony of «Beautiful People,» December 5). It is a self-conscious effort to be French in sentiment, in Myconos of all places. Greek cinema, with too few exceptions, is still in that self-conscious, not-too-sure-of-itself mode, striving hard to appear Scandinavian, French, British, American, etc. – anything but Greek. «Beautiful People» appeals, mostly, to the upper classes, and the media who write and talk-show about them, ad nauseam. An «elite» fascinated with models, TV announcer celebrities, movie folk, football stars, architects and the rich, the more foreign the glitterati, the better. That leaves about 9.8 million Greeks with their stories untold and out of the (cinema) picture. Not to mention that few of these 9.8 million could care less about the «ironic» angst of the Myconos bored. So how come the Albanians, the Yugoslavs, the Italians, the Iranians, etc. are so good at portraying themselves, making films that travel well beyond their ethnic borders? Regarding the plane-spotters, most Britons are familiar with their hobby and regard it as strange but not unduly worrying.
