MOVIE REVIEWS : GREECE SINGS THE BLUES IN ‘REMBETIKO’

When a million impoverished Greek nationals and Armenian refugees from Asia Minor poured into Greece after the Turkish attack on Smyrna in 1922, they formed a class of social outcasts known as rembetes . The rich folk music in which they poured out their sorrows was called rembetiko (accent on the second syllable).

Costas Ferris’ “Rembetiko” (Fox International) is as irresistibly heady and intoxicating as the music it celebrates while telling the life story of one of its most famous singers, Marika Ninou. Rembetiko flowered in the hashish dens of Piraeus when the blues did in the gin mills of the American South.

Rembetiko can have a strong Oriental flavor, like belly-dancing music; at other times it reflects more than a touch of flamenco and Gypsy music. But even at its liveliest, this music of the people seems endlessly plaintive, and with good reason. No sooner had rembetiko caught on with the larger Greek public by the end of the ‘20s than its musicians faced oppression and even death during the Metaxas dictatorship of the ‘30s, which closed down the rembetiko taverns. Yet it persisted, even when a man could be arrested for carrying a bouzouki in the streets, and it sustained the poor during the Nazi occupation of Greece.

“You don’t need a voice,” says Bobbis (Nikos Kalogeropoulos), a young bouzouki player and composer, encouraging Marika (Sotiria Leonardou), then only shaking a tambourine in his band, to become a rembetiko singer. “You’ve got sorrow and pain inside you.” Born in Smyrna in 1917, Marika was about 8 when she witnessed her drunken, brutal father kill her fed-up, adulterous mother. In her teens she became captivated by a dashing itinerant magician, only to have him abandon her and their child.

In her troubled life and her highly emotional impact upon audiences, Marika brings to mind Edith Piaf. The abundantly talented Leonardou, who wrote the film with Ferris, even looks like a sturdier Piaf, but in her dark, smoldering beauty she also sometimes brings to mind the enigmatic Mona Lisa and, at other times, the earthy Anna Magnani.

Driven by a ruthless ambition, she lives a hard, passionate life that leaves her stoic on the outside but despairing, succumbing to drink, on the inside. For a long stretch after World War II she was on the skids in America.

Marika’s life embodies what rembetiko is all about, yet this sweepingly romantic film is by no means a conventional biography. It is more a folk opera, unfolding in the most enticingly seedy and brooding atmosphere in which lust becomes a respite for despair. It is a film full of dark, low-ceilinged taverns in which solemn working men dance and drink (or smoke) away their woes.

Cinematographer Takis Zervoulakos, who favors deep, bluish shadows, and composer Stavros Xarchakos have created a remarkable blending of sounds and images of overwhelming sensuality, in which a languorous movement of the camera echoes the tempo of the music. While only fleetingly specific in its depiction of sex, “Rembetiko” manages to be pretty hot stuff for all its sadness.

By the ‘50s, Marika’s life was drawing to a close at the same time as rembetiko was being supplanted by the popular bouzouki music to which it gave birth. But Greece’s return to democracy signaled a revival and a renewed appreciation of rembetiko. “Rembetiko” (Times-rated Mature for adult themes) took the Silver Bear at Berlin in early 1984--almost at the very moment famed rembetiko composer Vassilis Tsitanis, who served as the model for Bobbis, died and was accorded a traditional rembetiko funeral that was attended by Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou.