25/10/2024 - A small family in a Greek village struggles in the heart of a Dostoevskian spiral à la Crime and Punishment in Dimitri Nakos’ strong debut feature

“We don’t have a choice. You know what we have to do and we have to do it fast.” By opening his debut feature in the blood of an illegal slaughterhouse and following it up with a very violent dispute between two neighbours in total disagreement over the borders of their respective properties, Greek filmmaker Dimitris Nakos clearly sets the tone: Meat [+see also:
trailer
interview: Dimitris Nakos
film profile], unveiled in the Discovery section in Toronto and in competition this week at the 46th Cinemed – Montpellier Mediterranean Film Festival, promises to be full of tensions fed by materialism. And in fact, an impulsive crime occurs very soon, triggering a devastating familial mechanism tied around the question of responsibility and culpability in a village where everyone’s personal interests are tightly linked and rumours circulate fast.

“It’s going to be wild.” Takis (the excellent Akyllas Karazisis), the very domineering father of the family, couldn’t be more right as he prepares the opening party, planned for the following day, of a butcher shop where he intends to employ his indolent son Pavlos (Pavlos Iordanopoulos) and the reliable and devoted Albanian man Christos (Kostas Nikouli), whom himself and his wife Eleni (Maria Kallimani) have been watching over since his adolescence. An unpleasant event occurs in the person of the vindictive Kyriakos, recently released from jail and who contests the limits of the land where Takis and the two young men raise and butcher sheep in an illegality covered by corrupt local police officer Giorgos (Giorgos Symeonidis). All these characters are ready to feed an imminent tragedy and its consequences: the same night, Pavlos kills Kyriakos who’d come to poison the animals and convinces Christos (“we’re not friends, we’re like brothers”) to hide the body and not tell anyone. But of course, Kyriakos’s disappearance doesn’t go unnoticed for long and an investigation begins, putting a lot of pressure on the whole little family…

Secrets, suspicions, threats, revelations, interrogations, bribing, betrayals, the search for solutions to allow Pavlos to escape justice and Takis to avoid social shame and the liquidation of his economic hopes: Meat implacably decorticates over ten days (with a script written by the director) the tumult electrifying the family and violently bringing back to the surface all their unspoken dynamics (“I’m gonna work hard all my life and chop up meat? Did you ever ask me what I wanted? - I wish you’d never been born”). This sharp plot takes its time to detail the numerous and stormy asides typical of such an exceptional situation, the exchanges of glances, the outbursts, the dishonest suggestions, etc. Sincerity and manipulation overlap in a twilight atmosphere crossed by the manoeuvres of an omnipotent and rather unscrupulous father (the mother soon gets in line) thinking he can solve everything with banknotes and to the detriment of “innocents”. Thus arises a “Dostoevskian” film about lineage, crime and punishment, maybe even a more vast parable about contemporary Greek society, which borrows very convincingly (despite a few long moments and a slight abuse of hand-held camera) the path of the film noir, wrapped in a remarkable score by Konstantis Pistiolis.

Meat was produced by Fantasia Ltd and co-produced by Foss Productions.

(Translated from French)