Ulysses' Gaze

The Greek director Theo Angelopoulos, winner of the top prize at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival for Eternity and a Day, will never build an audience of casual filmgoers. But then he doesn't mean to. Demanding, difficult, portentous, Angelopoulos makes films in his own deliberate style: sometimes awe-inspiring, sometimes mystifying. When he's at his best, as in the beautiful and devastating Landscape in the Mist, the results can be spellbinding. Ulysses' Gaze is a typically fascinating, typically long (three hours) work. Harvey Keitel, moving through the film at an intense murmur, plays a Greek filmmaker known only as "A." After many years in America, he returns home for an odyssey in search of some early film footage shot in the Balkans, a quest that leads him through that war-torn area and finally into the bombed-out city of Sarajevo. Angelopoulos establishes such a dreamlike rhythm, and his images (like a giant stone head of Lenin, floating down a river) are so striking, that adventurous filmgoers should find this experience absorbing, if enigmatic. On the other hand, Roger Ebert described Ulysses' Gaze as "a numbing bore." But even he would probably admit that no one else on earth makes movies quite like Theo Angelopoulos. --Robert Horton