This elliptical drama by the Greek writer-director Jacqueline Lentzou rousingly summons the inner turmoil of a young woman who returns home to care for her ailing father.
The writer and director Jacqueline Lentzou’s “Moon, 66 Questions” takes cues from astrology, using Tarot cards to represent each new chapter of a story about a young woman, Artemis (Sofia Kokkali), who returns to Athens to care for her ailing father.
Her father, Paris (Lazaros Georgakopoulos), has a degenerative disease that renders him almost speechless and incapable of easy movement. Forced into an unprecedented intimacy, daughter and father grapple with their new bond, gradually revealing the near-nonexistence of their past one.
Though there is an eventual revelation that throws Artemis’s woes into sharp relief, this moving character study — the kind that sinks beneath the skin — avoids the intricate plotting of a neatly packaged personal development. Instead, “Moon” is an elliptical drama that pieces together banal VHS recordings overlaid with spoken diary entries, tense familial encounters, and displays of solitary, existential angst rousingly performed by Kokkali.
And as the title suggests, the film yields more questions than it does answers.
How old is Artemis and where was she living before her return? For how long? What happened to her relationship with her family and why is she the only member taking responsibility for this man she does not truly know?
Lentzou, with her first feature no less, gets at something much knottier about what it feels like to get older and perceive your parents as full people, in all their flaws and vulnerabilities; the pains and pleasures of adulthood, contrary to expectation, yield just as much, if not more, unpredictability than in youth.
That’s why Lentzou’s use of astrology works so beautifully. The film’s moody textures and atmospheric unease goes hand in hand with the pseudoscience, emblematic as it is of a yearning for certainty in a dark and infinitely mutable world.
Moon, 66 Questions
Not rated. In Greek, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In virtual cinemas and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
