O Theos agapaei to haviari, the epic story of sailor, entrepreneur and national hero Ioannis Varvakis, has triumphed at the box office in dark times for the country's self-worth
The Greeks never used to have hero issues. But heroes have been in short supply in the country's hour of need, which could explain the rush to cinemas to spend time in the company of an 18th-century pirate turned luxury foodstuffs tycoon. Recent release O Theos agapaei to haviari (God Loves Caviar) is the story of Ioannis Varvakis, an Enlightenment-era rapscallion who sided with the Russians in their 1768 war with the Turks, befriended Catherine the Great and built a fortune out of sturgeon eggs – then gave it all away to help his motherland fight the Ottoman empire. It's not exactly all-action Pirates of the Aegean; with Catherine Deneuve as Catherine, John Cleese as an English colonial officer and The Lives of Others star Sebastian Koch as Varvakis, this is one high-seas jolly fishing for a more upmarket kind of international harbour.
It's done the trick in Greece, topping the box office for three weeks in October and taking $2.7m (£1.7m) to date, making it the year's highest-grossing domestic film. The tale of an Odyssean rogue making good in stormy times has struck a national chord; it seems to have made no difference whatsoever that the film, directed by Yannis Smaragdis (who after his 2007 biopic of El Greco seems to be monopolising the Hellenic-icon market), has come in for a rough critical ride. "Turgid, awkward and as insincere as they come," wrote IonCinema's Nicholas Bell after the film screened at Toronto earlier this year. "This historical melodrama is one painfully orchestrated scene after the other."
Greek criticisms were more focused. Giannis Zoumboulakis of centre-left daily To Vima seemed disappointed that Smaragdis hadn't made his case for Varvakis as Greek exemplar more clearly. "The problem is that he doesn't impose the 'Varvakeion ideal' through the body of the film per se. On the contrary, you feel it from the beginning as a given fact, similar to what Smaragdis did in his previous film, El Greco. It is obvious that the director can't (and perhaps doesn't want to) hide the huge admiration he has for Varvakis, the same way he did not hide it for El Greco."
Meanwhile, K Terzis of the more radical-left I Avgi was downright sceptical about any political or social pretensions God Loves Caviar might have. "Smaragdis reproduces the well-known national narrative on screen, a narrative he doesn't seek to redefine (to meet current needs) to address the crucial questions concerning our identity, questions that penetrate the body of our society today; he simply seeks to 'apply a balm' to the soul of today's Greek with another biography of a great Greek, because, as the director casually reveals: 'If each of us followed his example then today Greece would definitely be different.' Is it that simple? To get today's unemployed or debt-ridden shopkeeper to adopt the model of a pirate – a tycoon of the 18th century?"
Smaragdis is starting to take on the air of a bit of a chancer himself: budgeted at €6.5m (£5.2m), God Loves Caviar is the most expensive Greek film ever, brushing past his own El Greco's €6.2m. There's no doubt that the country's film industry needs a pennant production to flag up the commercial side of things and complement the acclaim Yorgos Lanthimos and Athina Rachel Tsangari, the "Greek freak" directors, are bringing in at the arthouse end. But the film has launched in vastly different conditions to when El Greco gathered $8.2m in 2007. Greek box office dropped by about a third to around $100m last year, and looks like it's going to take a further 20% hit this year. God Loves Caviar has done well considering to drum up 300,000 punters so far, but it's not enough to put the film into profit.
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Despite the flashy casting, its foreign prospects seem limited: Ioannis Varvakis has far less international recognition than El Greco, and the hostile reviews seem likely to sink God Loves Caviar's prospects. But perhaps Smaragdis is content just to have crafted a heroic figure for his country – whether or not you think God Loves Caviar's philosophy of picaresque opportunism is a responsible one given the scale of Greece's problems.
But who said heroes were about realism or clearheadedness? Attempts to consciously manufacture them often fall flat, as Hollywood frequently discovers. Skyfall, which knocked God Loves Caviar off its perch in Greece, was one of the more intrepid recent experiments in remoulding a hero for the times. It felt a little too complacent, though, to coherently reposition Bond: highlighting Britain's fallen world-status through him, then redundantly spending its last hour on a reassuring trip down pop-cultural memory lane.
But then Britain isn't truly desperate. Heroes are most effective when the need for them is greatest, as God Loves Caviar shows. It doesn't even matter if a bankrupt country ends up saluting a luxury-goods pioneer. Or if the film isn't much cop.
• Thanks to Michael Moloney at Hellenic Bookservice for the translations.
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