Michalis Konstantatos
Luton

A woman runs on the treadmill, coughs, increases the speed, and continues to run for a good two minutes. The camera frames only her mouth, neck, and shoulders.

The school exit, the stream of children leaving, the school slowly emptying and leaving just one boy sitting on a bench.

The counter of a shop, a cigarette resting in an ashtray, a cup of coffee, a man whose face is not framed opens a newspaper, lingers on an advertisement featuring a girl in lingerie, then he flips through it and stops on the classifieds. A customer arrives, buys some cigarettes, he searches for change from the fifty note she handed him, then mutters as he watches her leave; a boy arrives with a delivery of croissants, a call from his wife…

If this seems like a slow and boring description, you’ll probably find the first ten minutes slow and boring too, but let's also say the first hour of Luton, a 2013 film by Michalis Konstantatos. This is indeed one of those films that you start watching, continue to watch because the scenes, disconnected, slow, detailed, capture your attention and stimulate your curiosity, whether you like it or not, and you find yourself realizing that more than half an hour has passed and you still have no idea what the plot of the film is. This happened to me while watching it, and this is what makes me say: ‘Well, this is a film that I like’. Sometimes I experience something similar with food when I'm eating something that has no flavor: I persist in eating it all, continue eating because I want to grasp that flavor, or even because I'm convinced that I actually like that thing. In this case, it’s not just the curiosity to discover the true essence of the film that keeps me watching but indeed the pleasure inherent in those ‘flavorless’ scenes. It’s not a novelty, after all, for my beloved contemporary Greek cinema: Luton adds to a short yet significant list of Greek films from recent years that I have seen, where it’s impossible not to notice a leitmotif that connects them: among the elements that characterize them all is precisely this detached, bare narration, a cinematographic brutalism that reflects in the scenography. However, in the aseptic framing, there is also a nervousness, an almost obsessive focus on details, like the kiss between the two teenagers, to which the lens gets closer and closer, recording in detail the lips that bite, clash, entwine with one another, the sound of teeth, the sound of saliva. There is no trace of romanticism, nor is the director's eye ironic or detached; it almost seems like a dirty shot from a very poor quality film, a realistic non-documentary, and it is aware. Aware of what, I don’t know. It’s in line with the stylistic feature of the film, but I wonder what it wants to communicate: nothing. Everything.

Luton leaves everything to the viewer. In its narrative silence lies its awareness and the skill of those who wrote and directed it. Simply put, its plot could be summarized by saying that the lives of three seemingly unrelated people are intertwined, hidden from the eyes of others and in a surprising way. Luton is a profound film that shows what lies beneath the surface in a deliberately cold and aseptic way. What is cold and aseptic is not only the mode of narration but also the way in which the world of its characters and society are represented. But in that very way, we peel back the veil and see what is underneath, like a hidden wound revealed with a mix of disdain and indifference, with sadistic joy in seeing the astonishment of those who couldn’t imagine its existence simply because they couldn’t see it. The feelings are so strong and deep that they are enveloped, covered, buried and explode with all their rage, but in silence. The sounds, of gym machines, the tongues, the teeth that kiss, that suck the soup, the clattering cutlery, and a thousand other ambient sounds, express the dichotomy between noise and silence, between what is important and what is apparently not, but is instead highlighted and emphasized to the point of irritation, tangible, that you feel listening for two minutes to the same ticking, the same hammering, an infinitesimal noise that inserts itself into your ear like a gnat you can't swat away, while words are never shouted, barely spoken. So a kiss is superfluous only because it is replaced by a thousand other words, but a kiss is anger and hatred towards those who demand that those words need to be spoken to be understood, and wild, reckless joy in not saying them and noisily sucking them away, to make oneself heard.