The Suspended Step of the Stork

The first film of Angelopoulos's trilogy of borders. A television reporter travels to a town on Greece's northern frontier; the other side of the river is another country and the town is full of refugees. He sees an old man there and decides he is a politician who disappeared years earlier. He finds the man's wife and brings her, but she will not say whether she recognises him. The title comes from a scene: a soldier standing on one leg on the border line says that if he puts the other foot down he will be in another country. The most cited passage is a wedding: the bride and her family stand on one bank of the river and the groom and his relatives on the other, and the ceremony is performed without the two sides touching. Another follows the carriages of a disused train, each inhabited by a different refugee family. Marcello Mastroianni plays the old man and Jeanne Moreau his wife. Eleni Karaindrou wrote the music. An important work for anyone who loves Angelopoulos and the long take. For an impatient viewer it is almost motionless; it describes a condition rather than an event.