Adrift in Vardis Marinakis's Black Field

 

Two weeks after attending the Palm Springs International Film Festival, I find the films, events, and informal conversations with directors still fresh in my mind. Provocatively programmed and well organized, the festival showcased many films that both avid and casual movie-goers would want to see—if only given the chance. I wonder how many of the 190 films shown at the fest will find distribution, and I worry that my favorites will not.

Black Field, a Greek drama from young filmmaker Vardis Marinakis, was spotlighted in a festival showcase titled “New Voices, New Visions,” and I hope that a distributor will recognize Marinakis’s voice and vision and pick up this film. Beautifully photographed and delicately paced, the film at first seems like a well-crafted period drama but it is spiked with provocative imagery and unexpected events that make it thematically richer and relevant. (continued)

The film takes place in 17^th century Greece, when the Ottoman Empire ruled over the Byzantines in a military-style occupation. The occupation lasted for almost four centuries, until the Turks were overthrown by a Greek revolution that broke out in 1821. To replenish their army and maintain the strength of their occupation, the Turks drafted boys from occupied areas in a system known as devshirme, or children-gathering. Male children were confiscated at a very young age and raised as Turkish soldiers. Not only were they forbidden to return home, but they endured a rough, strict military training, part of which included the conversion to Islam and the instilling of hatred towards their homelands. These soldiers were known as janissaries.

Black Field opens with a janissary who has escaped from his Turk military unit. Wounded and exhausted, he arrives at a remote convent of Greek nuns when his horse literally drops from exhaustion. The nuns take him in and nurse his wounds, but as expected, the presence of a handsome, virile male amongst a group of women changes the dynamics of their relationships—as men are wont to do. Notably nervous is novice nun Anthi, who is both attracted to and fearful of the soldier. The Mother Superior secretly makes a deal with the Turks to give back the soldier in exchange for keeping her convent safe from their prying eyes, but Anthi helps the soldier escape in the nick of time. The two flee in the night, disappearing into the mist-shrouded forest, like characters in a fairy tale.

Once together, the soldier takes advantage of Anthi’s attraction to him and tries to initiate sex. Anthi quickly becomes a willing participant, but the soldier discovers what the audience already knows—Anthi is a teenage boy. The Mother Superior had taken him in as a child and raised him as a girl to protect him from devshirme. Only the Mother Superior knows the secret, and while her intentions were good, the gender lie makes coming-of-age confusing and difficult for Anthi. Once the soldier knows the truth, the film takes a different path to follow the twists and turns of the complex relationship between the man and the boy. 

The backdrop may be the Ottoman Empire in the 17^th century, but the film’s theme of gender identity and sexual orientation is more than relevant today. Whether Anthi’s attraction to the soldier and vice versa has a heterosexual underpinning or a homosexual one is the question initially raised by the film: How much did growing up as a girl in an all-female environment affect his personality, his sexuality, and his identity, if at all? The soldier is the epitome of macho behavior but learns to love Anthi. Was he homosexual? Bisexual? Or, does he respond to Anthi because they are two human beings with much in common who need interaction, compassion, love? The film provokes these questions but the open ending offers few answers or resolutions; viewers are left to ponder them on their own.

Questions like these were obviously on the minds of audience members at Palm Springs because of the nature of the Q&A with director Marinakis after the film. Several demanded to know if the actor playing Anthi was a girl or a boy. Marinakis coyly responded, “What is a boy? What is a girl?,” which succinctly summed up the theme of the film. Of course, future viewers intrigued by the film can look up the actor online before seeing it, but my advice is not to—the ambiguity enhances the gender-related themes as well as the performances.  

Black Field has much to offer beyond its exploration of gender identity. The storyline—disguising a boy as a girl to protect him from an enemy—is reminiscent of the myth of Achilles. Most know Achilles because of a story involving his overprotective mother, the sea nymph Thetis. She attempted to protect him by dipping him by the heel into the River Styx, but the place on his heel covered by her fingers left him with a vulnerable spot. Another plan by Thetis to protect her son was to send him to the remote island of Scyros dressed as a young woman to escape Agamemnon’s draft during the Trojan War. Achilles’s father was a mortal and his mother an immortal—always a formula for disaster in Greek myths. Like Anthi in Black Field, Achilles was not only disguised as a girl for his own protection, but his split parentage (mortal vs. immortal) and his choice of destinies (dying young in glory or dying old anonymously) caused him to suffer from an identity crisis. I appreciated how Marinakis echoed and expanded on the ancient myths of his country for his storyline, even if it was not intentional.

A less obvious strength of the film was its structure of opposing forces: male vs. female, masculine vs. feminine, Greeks vs. Turks, Christians vs. Muslims, the mystical vs. the earthly. The primary settings are also opposites: the claustrophobic convent vs. the open forest and fields. The former, which is built of stones and rocks, consists of dark passageways, tiny rooms with narrow windows, and dirt or stone flooring. The forest, on the other hand, is vast, vibrant green, and filled with the vividness of nature. The contrast is made obvious through the exquisite cinematography by Marcus Waterloo. Even the title “Black Field” is a kind of opposite—the black of the convent vs. the green of the field. Or, as Marinakis explained about the title: Battlefields that run black with blood and death later become fertile green fields for growing crops and plants. Presenting the narrative as a set of opposing forces fosters contemplation of their dynamic while preventing easy resolutions or happy endings.

In the Q&A after the film, Marinakis revealed that Black Field was his first feature, and that it cost less than $1 million. Given the film’s multi-leveled content and exquisite cinematography, I don’t know which fact floored me more.                                                                                       --Susan Doll