Pity
2018, 97 minutes, Digital
Greece and Poland
Language: In Greek with English subtitles
Director: Babis Makridis
Cast: Yannis Drakopoulos (Chevalier), Evi Saoulidou, and Nota Tserniafski
Screening within our Baltimore Greek Film Festival, which runs Nov. 2–4. Read more about the festival and the other films in the lineup here.
A man of about 45, the Lawyer, lives with his teenage son in a well-off home. He is healthy, with a pleasing face, good manners and is generally well maintained. His hair is perfectly cut and groomed. His wife, however, has been in a coma and has been in a private hospital for some time following an accident.
The sadness caused by this event has become the Lawyer’s main and most vital element of life, giving him a sense of pleasure that becomes an addiction. His grief has also suddenly made everybody have compassion towards him: the neighbor bakes him a cake, the dry-cleaners give him a discount, and he shares an emotional moment with an employee. His life has never been better than it is now that he is a sad, pitied person.
Then one day, his wife wakes up from the coma. Her return home radically changes his recently established everyday life of pity and sorrow. Sadness is now replaced by joy and he is overwhelmed by a yearning to go back to the previous, mournful state. He begins to invent ways to attract the pity that he has come to enjoy so much. He makes sure to destroy any happy moment that arrives, at first as part of a master-plan, but gradually with more frivolity and naiveté he totally loses control of himself.
“A disturbing and oftentimes very funny satire-drama, Pity is about that complex, primal human craving called empathy and the distance we’re willing to go to summon it.”
— Tomris Laffly, RogerEbert.com
“…as-Greek-as-it-gets black comedy. Pity, keeps the tone and pace austere, its stray lunges of overt gallows humor sticking like a knife between the ribs.”
— Guy Lodge, Variety
“As stylized as Makridis’ second feature is, it’s grounded in recognizable behavior, and its sly, dry playfulness reverberates with fascinating questions about emotions and how we portray them.”
— Sheri Linden, Hollywood Reporter
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