BLACK MILK
D: Nicholas Triandafyllidis; with Michail Marmarinos, Leroklis Michailidis, Tania Nasibian, Christos Stergioglou, Myrto Alikaki.
Triandafyllidis, a Chicago-born director of Greek ancestry, is a guy I’d love to treat to lunch some day. In my book, anyone clever enough to fuse influences as wildly disparate as Fellini, Almodovar, Buñuel, and Fifties-Sixties rock & roll culture (among countless others) deserves at least some level of artistic subsidy. Altruism aside, such a meeting would also allow me to hear straight from Mr. T’s mouth exactly what this impenetrably bizarre blend of surrealistic zaniness and cryptic philosophizing about art and love really means. True to the press kit summary, there does appear to be a recognizable plot thread involving a former wonder-boy writer named Alekos (Marmarinos) trying to recapture the emotional and artistic innocence he’s lost by selling out for the big bucks of commercial TV. This desire becomes so intense that he actually gains the ability to travel back in time and space to reconfigure his botched life. Beyond this, your guess as to the significance of Triandafyllidis’ colorful, sexy, lavishly imagined mess of a film is as good as mine. This is one of those oddest of cinematic animals: a movie that constantly stimulates the senses and imagination without necessarily being interesting or compelling. A real beard-puller, as my former roommate used to say.
This article appears in October 20 • 2000.