Director: Eleni Stavridou
Writer: Eleni Stavridou
Cast: Anastasis Kozdine
Running time: 19mins
At its core, Blue Coast is more of a feeling than a film – serving up a delicate balance of different ambiences and textures, its story leaning more heavily on the language of far-flung stares and the sad cry of the sea than on words. For me, that’s plenty. Whether it is enough for wider audiences remains to be seen.
Blue Coast follows Arian (Anastasis Kozdine), a wizened, weather-beaten caretaker, living in a remote resort town in Greece. Sometimes, his boss, Mister Panagiotis, calls upon him to undertake some menial task – fixing the beach shower, or re-plastering a crumbling section of ceiling at a rental property – but with the area deserted for winter, these tasks seem even more thankless than usual.
While he might at least receive a meagre scrap of praise for his work, or at least get to see the difference it makes to someone, Arian is left alone with his thoughts. Amid the endless grey of the winter off-season, Arian spends the rest of his time wandering across the jagged shoreline which unfolds seemingly without limit to either side of his periphery; or gazing out across the desolate infinity of the sea itself.
A short sequence in which he pours milk into a saucer, and leaves it for a stray cat living in his garden, gives a hint as to what he may be looking for. As he places the offering at the entrance of the hutch the cat frequents, it is one of the only moments something resembling a smile manages to creep onto his face. But the cat, presumably being feral, is only willing to approach the milk once he pretends to exit – gazing back over his shoulder to catch a glimpse of the only direct contact he has with another life-form in the film.
At one point, we also see Arian make a phone-call to someone called Miranda – his wife. It does not seem to follow the back-and-forth of a two-way conversation, so presumably he has only reached her voicemail. The message he leaves is one of desperation, pleading for her to “make some effort”, stating that “it’s been so long”, and despairing “this is no way to live.” He is estranged from his partner, his family, his old life – and while he sends money home to make ends meet, the cruel irony is that to support his loved ones, he has had to maroon himself in a seasonal ghost-town to do so.
All he has are his thoughts, the whisper of the wind, and the ever-present tumult of the ocean. As he gazes mournfully across the sea, the photography of Xenofontas Nikolakopoulos, and the natural sound design of Evangelos Makris do wonders to reinforce this feeling of terrible isolation. In the warmer months, the resort is something considered a ‘peaceful’ escape from the hubbub of everyday life for wealthy tourists – but for the man who facilitates this paradise’s upkeep, while scraping by on a minimal wage, this is a hellish oblivion which traps him with nothing else to consider but his fading dreams, and dwindling happiness.
The final segment sees these elements come together, with Arian reciting a poem which has touched him during one of the dark and lonely nights he has spent in the resort. ‘Para Elegjisë’ – by Albanian poet Azam Shkreli, and translated by Ervehe Gjoka – is a stunning lament to lost youth, and the regrets of time lost to simply making ends meet, and aspirations sacrificed to the reality of living a life for rent.
“One day you will take on your chest, the fallen leaves of your seasons. And you will search in vain for yourself on forgotten paths of youth. You will have no more hair in the breeze, no more rainbow gaze to measure the beginning and end of your short-lived illusion.”
In the hands of Kozdine, a veteran Albanian actor whose voice drips with gravitas and pathos throughout the reading, this working-class poetry is an inspired conclusion to Stavridou’s film. At the same time, as we see faceless tourists return to the resort, always facing away from Arian, we see the grim, thankless cycle continue – as not a drop of appreciation is thrown his way, not a scrap of connection offered to the lonely, poorly paid man without whom the ‘escape’ they spend the rest of the year fetishising would lose all of its lustre.
Set to Greek musician Michael Krumins’ ‘Infinity’, this sequence is also the only time that Stavridou allows us to be taken away from naturalistic sound. As it is the only time when Arian allows himself to engage his emotions, and admit his fearful thoughts vicariously through his engagement with the poem, this seems appropriate – and the music itself is a beautiful, understated synth piece that feels as though it belongs here anyway. A more bombastic piece of score, or the dreaded plinky-plunk piano piece, would have wrecked the balancing act Stavridou has pulled off – but there is no grand attempt to manipulate the audience into feeling a certain way in these final moments. While there is sadness to what we are seeing and hearing, there are also strains of defiance and even of hope, as Arian rails against his setting sun, and possibly finds new ways to revive the fire within himself, via poetry.
On this level, the film works extremely well. Where it falls down a little, is its attempt to engage with themes of racism and the exploitation of migrant workers in Greece. I bring that up now, at the end of the film, because I was not really aware it was a theme until after the film ended, and I scrolled to read the director’s own statement. Partially, this is my own ignorant fault – I have precisely no knowledge of Greek or Albanian, so when Arian presumably speaks both, to different people, I am not going to pick up on it. But I wonder if failing to foreground this more overtly might mean that Arian being a migrant worker – whose precarious position in Greek society means his exploitative boss is more able to take liberties with pay and conditions – is something an international audience won’t pick up on.
When it comes to recommending how to change the film to that end, I’m not really sure what to suggest. In a film which is so finely poised, and upon which much of the story hinges on subtle clues and changes, something on the nose to spell out Arian’s origins would probably come across as out of place, or even patronising. Even without this kind of elaboration, though, the alienation and mistreatment at the heart of Arian’s story still comes across, in a way that workers around the world will still be able to relate to.
I often write about the wonderful opportunities that film gives us to tune out the endless noise of society for just a little while, and to escape into our thoughts. But here, intriguingly, Eleni Stavridou presents us with a nightmarish inversion of that – playing on what isolation and ‘peace’ really look like when we experience them as a core element of our labour, rather than a holiday from our daily drudgery. Then, the peace we have come to fetishise as consumers can become just as alienating and maddening as the eternal noise we seek to escape.