"An Eternity and a Day", as the title translated in English means, is the answer Alexandros -the film's hero- receives as an epiphany, while pondering on the meaning of Tomorrow.

We surmise that he has only a few days left to live, and watch him face a dilemma: should he choose to give some meaning to the rest of his life, learn to love, care and express himself to the people he's in close contact with; or wither away, a stranger in his own life only to die a pointless death?

Contrary to popular opinion, the film's concept is really this simple.

Theo Angelopoulos has managed to win the appraisal of many, at the same time obtaining a hateful opposition. And while there are sequences in the film which will have you rolling your eyes and proclaiming "Get on with it!", it's unique pictorial beauty and lyricism will more than make up for the lack of movement.

Some of the downsides are the director's constant moulding of the world (and a strange one it is, where an 8 year old boy can debate like an adult and everyone spouts poetry instead of words) to fit his own megalomaniacal impulses - but maybe that's not a sin after all, maybe that's just what Creation is all about...

A deserved 7.

I should have known. A title that contained the word "eternity" sounded almost like an ominous warning. Indeed, Theo Angelopoulos' film is the kind of Palme d'Or winner I dread: the poetic film full of symbolism that I will force myself to appreciate. I could already see myself carefully picking my words in the vocabulary I reserve for 'serious films': abstract notions like "meditative", and "introspective", "fable", "parable" etcaetera etcaetera...

Because this is serious filmmaking, one that takes its subject seriously enough to consider that a melancholic voice-over can transcend the sight of a man wandering in a deserted seaside town during winter. As a matter of fact, it can, the sight of a man walking, climbing, wandering needs some textual content to sustain it. "Eternity and a Day" which is basically a journey into the memories of a Greek poet contemplating the finitude of his love and the incompleteness of his oeuvre is overloaded with such moments of quietness and self-questioning. It's a sort of crossover with "Wings of Desire" (also starring Ganz) and Federico Fellini's "8 ½"

In all fairness, I never got truly disappointed by a Palme D'Or winner but I don't recall a similar reaction since "Uncle Boomee" , there's just so much that my mind can endure before I get desperately seeking some plot. And when the film's melody started for the 345th time, I decided that the next thing I'd watch would be "The Fifth Element". Indeed, "Eternity and a Day" asks the eternal question: what is a great movie, after all? I read nothing but praises for it and even the word "perfect" was used to describe it. Is "Eternity and a Day" so perfect that a few movies lover have watched it and that it is the Great Prize winner of the same year "Life is Beautiful" that is celebrated?

Maybe Roberto Benigni had the merit of telling a universal story that embodied the best (and also the worst) of humanity, he might have been conventional in his approach, but Angelopoulos might have trusted our patience a tad too much. There's some material in the story, you have a dying poet named Alexandros (Bruno Ganz) who abandoned the project of writing an epic poem to complete the work of 19th-century Greek poet, Dionysios Solomos (Fabrizio Bentivoglio) and tries to live the last days of his life meditating on the time he lost, trying to find someone to take care of his dog and then picking a young Albanian kid and trying to send him back to his country.

That sounds like a story and there are some touching scenes but they're diluted in so many interludes and flashbacks that you never know exactly what Angelopoulos is willing to tell us. Of course there's poetry in a man revisiting his old childhood house, the very one sold by his daughter and her husband, or having a talk with his wife (Isabelle Renaud) resurrecting in her younger self, dressed all in white and sharing some moments of joy and tenderness. Of course the imagery is beautiful and there's a nice contrast between the grayish tones of the present and the lively and sunny past.

Still, while I was admiring the azure beauty of Greece and my heart was trying to connect with Alexandros, while I was rooting for the failed poet channeling Proust in his search for a lost time and reminisce about his own madeleine: an ugly thought was already traveling in my head: is it slow or am I just bored?

I let the viewer be sole judge, I am 5 reviews away from my 2000th, I've seen slow movies and introspective ones, with the exception of the man-and-boy friendship, I couldn't grasp the greatness of "Eternity and a Day" although I reckon it contain many elements of greatness but didn't find anything in the film to patch things together. It's a big reverie of a film, one so daringly slow and contemplative so capable to digress in the middle of action to let us wander in the youth of a man, and offer so beautiful long takes, isn't a work that you'd trash away like that. But why should that film be ever superior to a lesser one that has the ambition of entertaining you?

Maybe Angeloupoulos deliberately tried to explore the mind of a man who didn't achieve his goal because he craved for a perfection, a completeness that didn't or couldn't exist anyway. What does exist at the end? Our roots, our family, our earliest memories, perhaps that's the closest place to heaven on Earth, not the one where dreams come true, but the altar on which we honor our holiest values. Maybe the loss of his wife, the failure of his relationship with his daughter pushed him further toward the past ... maybe it's about idealization. Or being back to terms with his mother, the one who brought him to life and coming full circle. Maybe that's what it's all about: the old resurgence of energy before the acta est fabula.

It was Celine who said that "posterity is like speech for the maggots", maybe by feeling he's going to serve them quite soon, posterity or in fact the fear of not having one becomes the least of his concern. The parallel with the poet is interesting, here's a man who didn't achieve enough to be known by the whole world but there's still Alexandros honoring his memory, maybe with the little child, he's at least passing a tiny bit of his soul, not significant, but enough to be honored or at the very least remembered.

I'm doing my best but this is a film that's got a lot for it and I wouldn't dare question the treatment but honestly, I found it i low, excruciating slow and almost unnerving. This is a film I wanted to like but it depressed the hell out of me and felt like an eternity... and another eternity... and a day...