The Travelling Players (1975), Theodoros Angelopoulos

 

Following the gradual advent of a petty group of thespians into a not so blatant cityscape, we are offered to experience an array of genuineness through the melancholy, avidity and intimate conflicts of the same actors that sum up to be the unsung hymn of life itself. Theodoros Angelopoulos evaluates a narrative style of potential contemplation in his comparatively neglected magnum opus 'The Travelling Players', which will be remodeled and applied in upcoming arthouses and even in relatively significant films.

Overlaying narratives of contrasting time periods alters the lively simplicity of the characters by not only proving the entanglement to be complex but also the introduction of a viable commentary on Greek's political state is just as astonishing as it might be acutely demanding. 'The Travelling Players' is not incomprehensible but rather the more it gets demanding, the more it redefines itself by letting out the answers. The stagnant self indulgence of it's primary characters are efficiently compensated with the incantation in it's responsive demand.

With a vehement fanaticism in his eyes, Theodoros Angelopoulos primarily examines the political network of the country and it's perplexed regime during the country's situation of civil war. It is then that the emotional compulsiveness of the thespians are exposed flagrantly in an attempt to construct a bridge of reclusive reminiscence through the overlapping narrative of past events. While the analytical procedure of a demographic area through the characters present in it is obstinately unrevealing, Angelopoulos' artistic brilliance in framing the picturesque sequences of reasonable languidness succeeds in lensing the appealing tranquil perfectly which as a subsequent action draws and retains our eyes just steadily.

Emphasizing the dreadful eventuality and overemphasizing the inexorability in political liaisons with fascism, the Greek master's employment of a fascinatingly composite narrative never neglects the minute intricacies, implying the range of constructional grip even on an excruciating complexity of such level. 'The Travelling Players' is visually beguiling as it is it's cinematographic parameters that prospers in reputing the film to be one of the absolute visual paragons in cinema and a burying ritual in the closing sequence impulsively levitates it's extraordinaire to an ethereal standard through an indomitable query on inescapable demises.