Delivery (2004) Reviews

• Life and death in the urban chaos of central Athens

  pykep2005-07-10

  Urban alienation, anonymity, the lower levels of the new world order combined with the story of an awkward love affair are the issues of the new film by acclaimed Greek auteur Nikos Panayotopoulos. A young man with no identity, no ethnicity (although he's Greek most of the people he meets think he's a refugee) no past or future arrives in Olympic Athens. Everything after is a casual chain of events leading to a tragic end. Along the way he hangs around with the Omonoia Square "lowlifes", junkies, prostitutes, refugees and old homeless people. A "community" with its own rules, an inner city we all bypass pretending it does not exist (isn't it ironic that the Greek authorities during the Olympic Games tried to "imprison" the Omonoia junkies until the end of the athletic "carnival"?). Panayotopoulos made a film in which the other nice, comfortable and touristic side of Athens is nowhere to be seen! This decadent poetic vision of his is in contrast with the Olympic euphoria and the pride all Greeks felt by the successful organization of the greatest global event! The "normal" people of the film are only seen in their cars, stuck in traffic as well as in their own bourgeois microcosm. The lead (anti)hero of the film is a young man who rarely talks, do not seem to understand the world around him, doesn't have an aim in life and when he falls in love with his colleague in the pizzeria (a hunky prostitute) he seems incapable of dealing with it! Realism and surrealism coexist in an almost Godardian film world, the actors seem to be in their natural environment together with the real life people who appear in the movie, the whole Athenian underground life comes to the fore for…well, all medium and upper class people to see what they don't really notice in their everyday life. Cruel, tragic, comic and "artistic" at the same time, "Delivery" remains one of the bravest films ever to come out of the often tragically meaningless Greek Cinema. Nikos Panayotopoulos, together with Konstantinos Yannaris, is the most significant "voice" in Greek film-making. Beware though! The lump in your throat might not be a pop corn flake nor your martini olive. This is 'real' life ladies and gentlemen…and it hurts!