By Jim Gilles
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 6/4/22 – Georgis Grigorakis’s finely balanced feature debut Digger (Greece, 2020) owes less to its Greek predecessors in the Greek New Wave like Giorgos Lanthimos or Panos H. Koutra than it does the foursquare milieu of the American Western. Submitted by Greece for Best International Feature Film at the 94th Academy Awards, it did not make it to the final selection, but it remains an interesting landscape-centered, eco-tinged film akin to U.S. indies like Winter’s Bone, Leave No Trace, and Captain Fantastic. With its motorbikes standing in for horses and its self-reliant homesteader protagonist, Digger is hardly subtle in its refurbishment of the archetypal industry-comes-to-town story that’s familiar from so many revisionist westerns, like McCabe & Mrs. Miller. It also borrows from such films a demythologizing pessimism and overtones of anti-capitalism. Digger has been playing at the Laemmle Royal in West Los Angeles and should appear soon for online viewing in Laemmle’s Virtual Cinema offerings
At the film’s center is a solitary figure, Nikitas (veteran Vangelis Mourikis, recognizable as among the ship of fools in the Greek New Wave’s best film, Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Chevalier), who’s cut most of his ties and retreated to a cabin in the woods to raise chickens and see out his remaining days. He’s not an eccentric, but a gentle grouch, a bit of a loner, constantly scratching at an imagined tick bite on the upper reaches of his back. Upheaval is heading his way on two fronts, however.
Like his fellow villager in the forested mountains of northern Greece, Nikitas is under mounting pressure to sell his property to the mining company that’s moved into town. As such, he’s predisposed to view the irritation in his back as a parasite digging into his flesh to suck his lifeblood, just as the giant mining enterprise in the mountains is stripping the land of its abundance. But Johnny, who is Nikitas’ adult son Johnny (Argyris Pantazaras) is an outsider who doesn’t share his obstinate father’s antagonistic relationship to the miners. In fact, he’s desperately in need of the wages that they’re offering in exchange for wholesale despoilation. The itch is a phantom as far as he’s concerned, a benign defect that he’s inherited along with his father’s stubbornness and half his property.
Throughout Grigorakis’s film, cinematographer Giorgos Karvelas’s camera dwells on faces eloquent for their silence and mountainsides drenched in gloom. Transformed into wastelands by large-scale mineral extraction, the Greek landscape might almost be mistaken for the mythic West, or even the surface of an alien planet. But the filmmakers never let the viewer forget that these used to be forested ridges where chestnuts supplied local markets for centuries. In long shot, the mining equipment dwarfs its operators and, even when off screen, periodically fills the soundtrack with bursts of sinister, ever-encroaching noise.
As Nikitas teaches Johnny what he knows of husbanding the forest, their mutual suspicion diminishes, and in a pivotal scene, the out-of-focus photography and use of slow-motion impart a sense of time slowing to a serene trickle among the trees. In return, Johnny uses his skills as a mechanic to repair his father’s chainsaw, the grinding motor of which sounds identical to that of a motorbike. When Johnny and a local barkeep, Mary (Sofia Kokkali), fall for each other, Nikitas offers what passes for his blessing. But after Johnny succumbs to temptation and signs on with the mining company, theirs becomes the archetypal clash between father and son, age and youth, old and new, idealism and cynicism. In the end, though, Grigorakis’s ecological and humanist sympathies lie squarely with Nikitas.
Digger is deliberately paced, if not quite the full slow cinema: it displays a fondness for extended taverna scenes, positing the pub as the new cradle of Greek civilization, a forum for boozy democracy. Yet the pacing corresponds to the stubborn streak in its central characters, director Grigorakis giving himself and us time to chew these themes over and stake out every inch of this disputed territory. That surprising finale is contingent on us knowing exactly how everything and everyone in five square miles relates. The film comes off as heavy-handed but the expressive cinematography keeps us focused on the characters and the different attitudes about modern technology. Digger’s ending shows how machines that can ravage a forest can also save a life, that our tools are no better than their operators.
Mourikis, meanwhile, is busying himself crafting something quietly heartbreaking, almost a figure from 19th century fiction: a relic of a distant, less rapacious era, his Nikitas has grown increasingly tired of the modern world’s brutalities and indignities, but can only sit or shake a fist as what’s left of his dominion is bought off or chipped away.