| Carte Blanche | Athina Rachel Tsangari |

THE SHEPHERDS OF CALAMITY (THANOS AND DESPINA)
BY NIKOS PAPATAKIS

An impoverished woman wants to marry off her son to the daughter of a rich landowner. But he refuses to give his blessing and pursues his own plans. The Shepherds of Calamity was made after the Greek military coup in 1967 when a right-wing junta seized power in the country. The film is just as much political allegory as romantic tragedy. It all begins with an exploding goat—and remains persistently disturbing thereafter.

It starts with an exploding goat, ends with a leap into freedom, and there’s quite a bit happening in between: Thanos, the “Shepherd of Chaos,” leads sheep and people, including the film’s viewers, through a disturbing world where the scorching sun (seen right from the opening shot) and the merciless fate (familiar from Greek tragedies) have already spoken their final word from the very start.

Inevitably, Nikos Papatakis’ second film, made in Greece with French means, heads towards the Greek military coup of spring 1967, which brought a right-wing junta to power. The filming took place under the regime of the colonels, which lasted until 1974. And yet, in The Shepherds of Calamity (Thanos and Despina), nothing exists that wouldn’t dissolve the existing order from within.

What happens does not follow dramaturgical conventions or psychological patterns, but rather archaic compulsion and anarchic impulses. Thanos, a poor shepherd, wants to go to Australia. His mother wants him to marry Despina, the daughter of a wealthy landowner. But Despina’s father is trying to match her with a more bourgeois suitor. There’s another interested party, a friend of Thanos, who kills the sheep Thanos tends. Then, Thanos and Despina meet at the Easter church service, and the calamities intensify into catastrophe.

In the straitjacket of a backward, brutal, conservative, and patriarchal society, in which the rural population is left to its misery, Thanos and Despina introduce the element of chaos and freedom. But freedom can only be expressed within the corset, which distorts and grotesquely shapes it. One must watch Thanos dance with his dead dog on his back. One must see how Despina, in a monologue, rejects the progressive ideas of her brother on sexuality—and these ideas take possession of her as she speaks. One must endure that the “amour fou” between Thanos and Despina is not without violence and remains marked by a structural unity of sadism and submission. One must understand that the exploding goat at the beginning contains the film’s “logic”: A closed system is forced to burst under internal pressure.

Hatred stands out as clearly as the bones of a carcass decomposing in the sun. Both among the rich and the poor, for Papatakis (much like Buñuel) shows no sympathy for anyone, drawing no character more “sympathetic” than another. On the contrary: Thanos and his mother are left only with hatred, “for food,” the mother says, when there is nothing left to eat.

The rugged mountain landscape is at the same time a theater of phantoms and metamorphoses. How to escape misery? Through a series of transformations that are eruptive and unpredictable. Thanos is at times a shepherd, at times a madman, sometimes a subject, sometimes a revolutionary, sometimes illiterate, sometimes a hippie. In a brilliant scene, he even becomes Christ, whose icon in the center of the church appears just as Thanos does in the middle of the shot. It is Despina who “recognizes” him in this moment, and it is she who, in the emergence of her love for him, “escapes” the control of the people around them and the film’s audience.

In the final showdown, Papatakis quotes the ending of King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun, which also tells the story of a love-hate relationship. A duel is also Thanos and Despina. Between the lovers, but above all between them and the world, which they leap towards at the end, to explode in its face, like a goat under the scorching Greek sun.