Tuesday night, October 12, the Mill Valley Film Festival offered one of its few Greek movies, ever.  This is not the Festival’s fault.  Greek movie making has been in the doldrums for years and is just reviving with a handful of young directors. Vardis Marinakis, who directed tonight’s film, Black Field, Yorgos Lanthimos of last year’s acclaimed Dogtooth, and Alexis Alexiou and his Tale 52 [review] are  among them.  The line outside the Rafael Theatre was bubbling with Greek conversation.  I wonder what they all made of the movie they’d come to see?

The bare bones outline of Black Field is that a wounded Janissary, in 1654, collapses at the door of a mountain top monastery/nunnery.  Nursed back to health by two nuns he is particularly attracted to one, Anthi, played by Sofia Georgovassili, and she to him.  They escape together, have a tumultuous first sexual grapple in the autumnal forests before they are captured by the Turkish bandits he had fled from.  The nun is delivered back to the convent and the Turks take their man away.  Gripped by the just arrived knowledge of herself, Anthi, re-escapes after scandalizing the nuns.  She finds the bandit camp just in time to help her man dispatch the band and they both take to the woods, the Janissary avoiding her and trying to get rid of her, disgusted by what he know knows of her.  Eventually, her dogged determination, allows him to re-find his passion for her and the mystery of love begins.

That’s the easy part.  Because all stories are more complicated.

The cinematography, by the talented Marcus Waterloo,  is absolutely stupendous. The opening scenes as a tiny rider moves across a vast green and foreboding landscape promise much, and much is delivered: many scenes of the wild country side, dark clouds against the disappearing blue of the sky, river scenes,  perfect shots through foliage so that some leaves are sharp in a haze of others, a veil of mystery and sensuality.  Equally, the filming inside the monastery is gorgeous, slow paced and revelatory of the quiet, the impregnability of the stone, the labyrinthine corridors.  Several times we see a high wide shot of the central courtyard — white and gray stone everywhere– as the nuns came out in ones and twos.  All we can see are foreshortened views of them, from the top, entirely black.  They cross paths, keep  going on their ways, giving us both abstract art, and a sense of  chaotic order, patterns of the incidental.

The story, as all stories must, speaks about the present by looking at the past, or understands the past from the vantage of the present.  For Marinakis this is explicitly NOT a period piece, not just a fanciful or even determined look at a piece of Greek history.  It is simultaneously cultural clash — religious and warrior, woman and man– and an identity clash —warning spoiler— man brought up as woman discovering his manhood, discovering sexual attraction to an older man (as his woman self, or as his man self?) and the warrior man trying to come to grips with his attraction to the younger man, woman.

It turns out, perhaps known by most Greeks, that the Turks, who were at the height of their power in the 17th century, replicated an old Roman custom: they carried off young boys and trained them up into their armies.  These were the feared Janissaries.  There were at least rumors — whispered by one of the nuns– that part of the training was as the  teacher-student sexual relations of  the Golden Age of the Greeks.  Many families, it is said, gave their young boys into convents to be brought up as girls to avoid such a fate.

As  Marinakis realized the story he saw he had two men, one kidnapped by the Turks, the other  “virtually” kidnapped by the nuns.  Both had been stripped from their childhood and raised foreign to their culture and possibly nature.  Both groups, warrior and religious, are extremely severe and authority bound.  Neither kidnap victim has the freedom to explore or know themselves.  Put them together, thinks Marinakis.  Let’s see what happens.

Anthi carries the bulk of the acting load.  The Turk, though he is  on screen much of the time, is, except in the final 15 minutes, a Christian-Turkish tough guy, a warrior, with that limited range of expression  –which he does admirably enough.  Mother Superior of course is a major force in Anthi’s life, but is limited to showing courage and compassion in a black habit during the movie.  It is Anthi on whom it all depends.

She begins as a beautiful, habit framed face.  Really, you don’t want her to leave the screen.  Even as she begins to show a more desperate piety than we outsiders think is really  necessary, we are drawn to her.  When she begins cutting the insides of her thighs as an act of mortification we begin to suspect all is not well.

There are mysterious interchanges.  Mother Superior says to her, “your secret is safe with me.”  Another young nun sits beside her on her bed and says “you and I are one, the same” and looks at her tenderly, to be driven away by Anthi’s disgust.  She does not partially disrobe with the other nuns to wash their outer habits, and is teased for her shyness.  We moderns begin to suspect something in this slow dance of revelation.

After one of her visits to the invalid, and chained Turk, and rubbing his feet with a balm of her own making, we see her tossing and turning in her sleep.  We see a phallus.  We see her in her dream, men kissing.  In the morning as s/he cleans up from likely a first nocturnal emission, we know.  The Turk does not.

Black Field — and I am not clear what the name refers to; it seems to be a literal translation of the original Greek, Mavro livadi — uses the historical antecedents of the 17th century to look at the conflict inherent in modern identity discovery and exploration, the rough and the sweet edges of it.

For all that it’s not clear in the end, to me at least, what has been discovered.  The warrior’s final announcement of desire is a forest floor rape, seemingly acquiesced to, that goes on much too long and in too much detail.  It’s a complaint I have of many movie’s these days, hetero or homosexual love.  Let my have my imagination back!  I didn’t come here for a clinic! And then, the younger man his face rising against the dream-like backdrop of the leaves and branches seems to enter into an altered state, at least the score suggests so, though earlier both seemed to hear this primeval music together.  But we see no more of the warrior.  We don’t see them tenderly, or companionably together.  We know they have both experienced a fornication, and one that has spiritual/musical resonance but there we are left.  I don’t think the music as we go to credits means simply, bliss.

I’d see it again to try to follow that trace better but I warn you you might want a distractor while the forest floor is thumped with love’s mystery.