Souvliste tous! Etsi tha paroume to kouradokastro

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DIRECTED BY: Nikos Zervos

FEATURING: Konstantinos Hristidis, Dimitris Poulikakos, Thekla Tselepi

PLOT: The daily escapades of a group of hippies, two men and two women, in 1980s Athens.

COMMENTS: The tale begins after the clumsy introduction of our protagonists, each presented with a distinct musical theme. We follow a group of wannabe hippies with weird names like Daisy, Oratios and Kyros, as if taken out of Mickey Mouse comics.  This group, vagabonds in the eyes of society, live without regular jobs, indulging in free love, listening to rock and roll, and finding money mainly by asking their middle-class relatives. They wander through Athens and the surrounding countryside without clear purpose at first, but find one towards the end of the movie when they attempt to save a friend of theirs from a satanic psychiatrist. Yes, it is as silly as it sounds.

What we have here is a free-form, not exactly coherent, almost improvisational narrative portraying the underground rock music scene of 1980s Greece. Segments attack middle-class hypocrisy, from the pseudo-intellectual reporters who approach our characters pretending to be interested in the underground rock scene to portraits of traditional nuclear families hiding  wild instincts and a myriad of pathologies under a pretense of normalcy. This becomes the main focus of the second half of the film when one family’s daughter, Elenitsa, is put in a psychiatric hospital against her will. Our deadbeats attempt to save her.

This is not a movie that takes itself or its main characters too seriously, however. Daisy, Oratios, Kyros, and even Elenitsa claim to be idealists, but are proven hollow in the end, unable to bring about real social change. An alternative title of the movie roughly translates as “This is how we are waiting to take the castle made of shit?” This is exactly what one of group wonders about himself and his friends, underlining the hollowness of their rebellion. Their fight against the castle made of shit is in vain—because they do not really want to fight, they just want to have fun.

Dimitris Poulikakos, a well known rock musician in Greece, narrates the tale in voice-over. Polikakos also appears in Aldevaran (1975), an earlier Greek movie of a similar style portraying the underground art and music scene of the 1970s.  This movie also shares some DNA with other works of its director, Nikos Zervos, like Exoristos stin kentriki leoforo ( 1979). Not only are there common themes like the hollowness of the hippie lifestyle, but they share similar narrative approaches, defying traditional structures.

If it is not already clear, this is not exactly a surreal movie. It is a parody and deconstruction of middle-class morality and of counterculture idealism, but this only makes it slightly eccentric. It should be noted that technical aspects make it a difficult watch, as the audio quality is really bad. It will also be a real challenge for non-Greeks to find this one. Copies exist online—though not in well-known legit platforms—and some DVDs can be found, but without English subtitles.

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