The title of this lyrical but frustrating docu-essay about director Rita Azevedo Gomes’s travels in Greece cuts both ways. Is it expressing impatience with the classical ideals she hopes to discover there; or, borrowed from street graffiti, is it actually critiquing the modern society that has betrayed ancient standards of beauty and harmony and, in the words of Albert Camus cited here, “has fed its despair on ugliness and convulsions”?
Nostalgic aspirations and the sobering here-and-now vie for supremacy in the texts recited by Gomes and others over travelogue images from Athens and the Cyclades beyond. As if echoing heroic voyagers past, she adds a layer of fictionalisation to her exploits, reading a poem written by João Miguel Fernandes Jorge based on a journey there in 2007; it becomes the story of Irma, who romances a young man, Ion, on the island of Delos, birthplace of Apollo and Artemis. But the affair founders – and there are other reality-checks, such as the incongruous Chinese cargo ships that now traverse the 21st-century Aegean.
The tension between myth and modernity, expectation and reality hangs over the film like the red kites hovering above the ancient ruins. It is only two-thirds of the way in that Gomes reveals what originally made her seek refuge in Greece: an ominous medical diagnosis that has apparently since receded. While it’s clear her preoccupation was beachcombing for consolatory beauty and transcendence, it feels only fleetingly present in a visual collage that is haphazardly aligned with these dense texts. Gomes’s crew read many of them on camera – also including excerpts from past Hellenic seekers including Byron and Keats – but this alienation device comes over inert and uninspiring.
Maybe these forlorn ramblings are part of the point; that our degraded modern sensibilities can no longer serve up classical concision. Belatedly supplying some focus, singer María Farantoúri – whom Gomes watched on her first visit – keeps the old flame burning in her lyrics. “The people always find new kings – but we are poets and we remain alone.” Gomes is clearly glad to be part of her camp, far from the polis. But her sphinx-like film is a few shades too cryptic to fully enchant.
• Fuck the Polis is at the ICA, London from 4 June.
