What kind of man are you, don’t you even like dolphins? Zorba the Greek
You are going to see a woman stoned just because a man killed himself because she slept with another man. You are going to see people taunt a widow just because she did not remarry. You are going to see the awful reality of past times. But then you hear the first two notes. Ta-dam! And you already know it’s the sound of syrtaki. The crescendo continues. The movement becomes faster and faster, but this film stays with you a long time.
Directed by Michael Cacoyannis (Michalis Kakogiannis), a Greek Cypriot filmmaker, it was Zorba the Greek (1964) that put Greek cinema on the map. Cacoyannis’s work is rooted in Greek classical texts, and includes films like Electra (1962) or Iphigenia (1977), which tell the classical stories of female sacrifice.
Starring Anthony Quinn as Alexis Zorba and Alan Bates as Basil, this film tells the story of Basil, a British-Greek writer, raised in Britain, who meets a Greek-Macedonian peasant, Zorba, and tells him that his goal is to travel to his father’s land and reopen a lignite mine. Zorba persuades Basil to take him along because he’s an experienced worker. In the next couple of days, they find the mine unsafe, but Zorba has an idea: use the nearby forest for logging and transport the wood via a zip line. But this isn’t a film about a huge business endeavor – it’s about people and traditions, about inner desires and hidden passions.
The movie itself is not a typical trope of an unlikely friendship. It uses the Basil-Zorba relationship to tell the story of their two worlds and how dreadful human existence can sometimes be. The village people care deeply about tradition and moral duties, but when someone dies, they scavenge the place within minutes, revealing the hypocrisy hiding in each of us. It’s easy to judge other people by our immaculate moral standards, and then forgive ourselves now and then for taking the wrong path.
Some critics have stated that the plot seems watered down and becomes a series of unrelated, unimportant incidents. But this is not a story about a feat or a goal – this is a depiction of a different world with contrasting traditions. Each of the smaller stories contributes to the overall illustration of such a world. Shot on the wonderful island of Crete, the film shows the village people trying to steal a widow’s goat just because she still has not remarried. We need to observe people coming out of a church and trying to kill her. We need to see a has-been woman desperate to get married and worrying about what other people will say if she stays single. All of these narratives flow into a unique description of society, not much different from many of our own, but differing only in the choice of moral stances that are considered important.
The movie score by Mikis Theodorakis accompanies the picture perfectly. This classical composer of chamber and symphonic music, as well as ballets, is best known for his film scores, including Ill Met by Moonlight (1957), Z (1969), and Serpico (1973). The theme of the famous Zorba’s dance, choreographed by Giorgos Provias, became a Greek national trademark, inspired by traditional Cretan dances. After ultimate failure, the only thing one can do is – dance. If this story teaches us anything, it’s the fact that small pleasures in life are powerful enough to keep you going. And this film does the same.
References
- Basea, Erato (2015). Zorba the Greek, Sixties exotica and a new cinema in Hollywood and Greece. Studies in European Cinema 12: 60-76.
- Karalis, Vrasidas (2017). Realism in Greek Cinema: From the Post-War Period to the Present. I. B. Tauris.