Cinema: Fallow Tragedy

The Fear. On the wheat plains of Greece, Anestis Canalis, a walleyed voyeur (Anestis Vlachos), goes prowling along a lovers’ lane. Peering through a car window, he sees a couple entwined. The woman spots him and shrieks. As Anestis gropes his way in flight through the grain, the man shouts after him: “I know who you are, you sex-starved bastard!”

Sex-starved, yes; bastard, no. His legitimacy and parental ties, in fact, are ultimately responsible for the destruction of the Canalis family, a clan as full of brutality and fanaticism as the Karamazovs. Cowed by his father, shunned by his stepmother and stepsister, Anestis blunders his way around the farm until one day he surprises the mute servant girl (Elli Fotiou) in the barn, rapes and kills her—a murder quickly discovered by his parents. Because he is their son, the couple cannot and will not turn the murderer in. In stead, the old man beats the boy remorselessly—and then that night helps row the corpse to the middle of a lake and sink it to the bottom.

The townspeople accept the servant girl’s disappearance, but the sister does not. She begins to grill her stepbrother, who hysterically runs to his parents for aid. To ensure her silence, the father consents to let her marry a man whom she loves—and he despises. At the Greek fete, as Anestis drunkenly dances in celebration of his stepsister’s wedding, the servant’s body mysteriously rises to the water’s surface and begins floating to shore, bringing with it the dissolution of the house of Canalis.

Widely celebrated in Greece, The Fear has not traveled well. Veteran viewers of French and Italian peasant dramas need not be reminded that the pastoral scene contains as much violence as the city. Writer-Director Costas Manoussakis includes several countryside shots as primitive and beautiful as a cave painting, but most of the time his grossly photographed story seems less written than plowed; his actors are rarely given more to do than grunt and stare emptily at the fallow land. In this case, its dramatic surface has barely been scratched.