Recently there’s been a surprising number of films about people with degenerative diseases, an apparently uncommercial subgenre that’s actually produced a number of sleeper hits and Oscar winners. If Jacqueline Lentzou’s Moon, 66 Questions doesn’t join them on the Kodak Theater stage, it will be for the noblest of reasons: too subtle, too resistant to awards-begging show-offery, too eager to take big, creative risks that might alienate as many people as they enrapture. Released by Modern Films in cinemas just one week after François Ozon’s superficially similar father-daughter tale Everything Went Fine, it shows there are still original, personal ways available to address this subject matter.
It begins in exactly the way Still Alice and The Father don’t, with near-abstract home video footage overlaid with a cryptic voiceover. The voiceover is spoken by Sofia Kokkali as the protagonist Artemis, who marks out the events in her life by pairing them up with artistic landmarks – “The Catcher in the Rye is first published, I learn to cook lentils” is a typical diary entry. The nostalgic imagery and focus on memory initially seem to be a commentary on the decline of her father Paris, who has recently suffered a stroke. But Paris’s condition is mostly addressed in terms of his physical frailty. The body of memories at the centre of Lentzou’s film is Artemis’s own, as the central tragic reversal of this kind of story – the child growing up to be a parent to the adult – forces her to reassess her relationship with her father and why they drifted apart.
Whatever Lentzou personally wanted to say with these more mystical segments, I saw them as a perfectly natural extension of Artemis’s personality, constantly looking for connections with something bigger, whether that’s consulting the tarot or marking Gena Rowlands’s birthday.
It’s a tearjerker of sorts, then, just one which achieves its greatest emotional effects through restraint. Moon, 66 Questions has been promoted with comparisons to the Greek New Wave, formerly known as the Greek Weird Wave until, I suppose, it became too familiar to be weird. I was a bit wary about this going in. I’ve enjoyed the work of the scene’s central directors Yorgos Lanthimos and Athina Rachel Tsangarai, but other films like Miss Violence and Pity have felt less like part of an organic scene and more like imitations. Moon, 66 Questions shares a theme of physicality and regression with previous Greek New Wave films like Attenberg, The Lobster and Boy Eating the Birds’ Food, but it uses long, static shots in a way that’s matter-of-fact rather than confrontational, and the first-person voiceover gives it a warmer, less alienating feel than anything Lanthimos has yet produced. There are some of the cheerfully weird artistic choices that have earned young Greek film-makers international attention – as well as the home movies, Artemis’s journey is punctuated by shots of cards from the Rider-Waite tarot deck – but they feel like a way into Lentzou’s more personal material, rather than a sop to any kind of wider scene or style.
If you’re keeping track, that’s two wider film movements – degenerative disease drama and the Greek New Wave – that I think Moon, 66 Questions has more differences than similarities with. A more useful comparison would be a style that I’m not even sure had a name, but which flourished briefly some ten years ago. Some two-thirds of the way through there’s an abstract star-field which reminded me of Anocha Suwichakornpong’s Mundane History. Suwichakornpong, whose work still doesn’t get the attention it deserved, was one of a number of directors in the early 2010s whose mission seemed to be forging a link between the everyday and the cosmic. It was a tendency that produced two back-to-back Palme d’Or winners – Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and The Tree of Life – as well as other acclaimed films like Post Tenebras Lux and Beasts of the Southern Wild. It’s a method that’s easy to mock, but seems to me to be worth reviving: as we face environmental collapse and social isolation, it is a fine and moral thing to remind people that every small, personal story is a part of the universe. Whatever Lentzou personally wanted to say with these more mystical segments, I saw them as a perfectly natural extension of Artemis’s personality, constantly looking for connections with something bigger, whether that’s consulting the tarot or marking Gena Rowlands’s birthday.
Most importantly, it doesn’t dampen the emotional impact of the story Lentzou is telling. Moon, 66 Questions won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, and at 108 minutes it did feel slightly overlong. There is a deceptive amount of focus, of dramatic and thematic unity, in this apparently slow, meandering movie – but maybe some people will check out before this becomes obvious. Regardless, Kokkali and Lazaros Georgakopoulos give strong, unshowy performances, never succumbing to the temptations of melodrama. Lentzou is also good at getting emotional power out of sometimes deeply unexpected music choices: Daniel Johnson’s plaintive ‘True Love Will Find You in the End’ is one thing, but who expected a film like this to feature a needle-drop of ‘Freestyler’ by Bomfunk MCs?
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