Invisible,The lonely course of the different

 The cinematographic lens presupposes or contributes to the human eye and the directorial perspective of the gaze of the observer or eyewitness. In this film, the camera, following the protagonist-hero, tries to capture not what his gaze confronts, but the peculiarity of this gaze, which deviates from the "average".
 
How Ares' petrified face and frozen gaze hides the extent of the distance between him and the way others treat him, the Others who no longer see him as a "person" deprive him of his "identity", while it becomes for them an "invisible" object?
 
The back and forth between fantasy and reality, the colors that mutate, the horizon that blurs or turns gold, the repeated journeys through the streets, the naked man who twists in on himself, all highlight the situation in which a man can lose his foundations (here through the loss of his work) and to become "invisible" to the rest, losing his very status.
 
The "invisible" Aris of Dimitris Athanitis is a low-paid worker who, through no personal fault, will be fired from his job in a factory in the area of ​​Aspropyrgos. He himself is lonely, without an extended family, without many friends, divorced, with a son whom he sees for a while and whose ex-wife leaves him with him, just as she is laid off.
 
Ares lives the absurdity of extermination and reacts, in his own intense and simplistically "childish" way. He decides to take revenge on the person he considers responsible.
 
The atmosphere is evocatively anxious in a film where the hero feels Stranger, Unknown, an Invisible man, who furiously seeks to regain his lost status, through self-righteousness as an act of natural restoration of justice, which will once again make him a The visible, for a world that does not hesitate to discard what it considers useless, without any hesitation.
 
His son as a projection and extension of him closes himself in the closet, disappearing himself. The scenes with the hero on the motorbike traveling useless routes, the unreal illumination of the sun on the sea, the dreamy moments of the father and son playing, serve this paradoxical game between what is seen and what is destined to remain un- spectacle.
The interpretations of Yiannis Stankoglou and little Christos Benetsis, shocking in their austerity, show us how it is possible to be together and yet indescribably alone.
 
The scene of the end is uniquely imprinted in our memory: the beach of Skinias, the forest scaled behind the bank, facing the sea, the human presence marking or even usurping the landscape, marking its ominous end. Imagination entangled with memory and reality hard to reverse its time. The space disappears from the hands of the little one caressing the face of the father as well as from his anxious running, which with a slowed down pace tries to cover the distance between him and the fallen body.

Time, like a river of blood and water, leads us (back? or forward?) to a place strangely lit, paradoxically bright. This is not a catharsis, much less a pessimism. It is simply another step in the human journey. Personal experience outside its closed circle, immersed in its brutal anticipation, brooding in its hurried silence, seeks a way out into its own u-local world, even if no one else can see it. Dimitris Athanitis gives a face to the Unknown Dead of the undeclared war. And light in the darkness of the blockade, to which he is forced to withdraw.

The director tries, in his own way, to make us "see" deviant people and therefore "unknown" or "strangers" to the average or what we have learned to define as "expected" and "normal ».

In which way we will read his story, will be judged by how sharp our gaze is to recognize the familiar through the foreign, to read, through the individual adventure, the competitive effort of the meeting of Man. with the others. His struggle against time or death, so that he can find the way to verify his human dimension, acquiring "visible existence".

Even if in the end it is sacrificed. Or for that very reason.
 
Anna Afentoulidou