The Price of Love

I timi tis agapis

Greece

1984

110 Min

Color

Greek

Currently 4.2/5 Stars.
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CAST Toula Stathopoulou, Anny Loulou, Stratis Tsopanellis, Spyros Antiohos, Giorgos Agiovlassitis, Aliki Nikiforidou, Costas Arzoglou, Akis Konstadis, Spyros Pantelios, Manolis Logiadis

Tonia Marketaki was born in Athens in 1942 and studied in Paris (I. D H. E. C.). She worked as a film critic from 1963-1967, before making her first, short film John and the Road in 1971. In the same year she is imprisoned and then exiled. Her first feature film Violent John (1973) won three awards at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival and critical acclaim in the Forum at the Berlin Film Festival. This was followed by the television series The Lemon Grove (1978) and the also awarded films The Price of Love and Crystal Nights. She has also been a theatre director, was a radio producer and worked as Assistant to the General Director in the National television. She has also been involved in translating and wrote poetry and works in prose. She is considered to be one of the most important women directors of New Greek Cinema.

John and the Road is the first short film of Tonia Marketaki, one of the most important Greek… read more

Tonia Marketaki was born in Athens in 1942 and studied in Paris (I. D H. E. C.). She worked as a film critic from 1963-1967, before making her first, short film John and the Road in 1971. In the same year she is imprisoned and then exiled. Her first feature film Violent John (1973) won three awards at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival and critical acclaim in the Forum at the Berlin Film Festival. This was followed by the television series The Lemon Grove (1978) and the also awarded films The Price of Love and Crystal Nights. She has also been a theatre director, was a radio producer and worked as Assistant to the General Director in the National television. She has also been involved in translating and wrote poetry and works in prose. She is considered to be one of the most important women directors of New Greek Cinema.

John and the Road is the first short film of Tonia Marketaki, one of the most important Greek directors. Influenced by neorealism and the French New Wave, she gazes upon the cinema of the seer and of the flaneur, leaving behind the cinema of action. In 1980 she made the following statement about her short film: “…I remember a phrase… a man swimming among things. I remember a heavy ambiance between drowning and pregnancy, a political dead-end, the post-teenage solitude trying to break free through integrating in groups. He wanders, feels and sees filmy, he doesn’t know where dream ends and reality begins. However there is a subconscious clarity: the back of your head records messages and processes them without you. Your subconscious knows more then you do, it cannot put them in words so it screams an alarm sign. A stoic smile and an adventure opens up in the future… and the future is you… On a Friday shooting was over. Next Friday it was 21. April 1967” (date of launch of the Greek coup d’etat).

Violent John is a film about the law and its theatricality. A young woman is found murdered. The reconstruction of the scene of the murder is done with flashbacks and testimonies of witnesses and suspects. The daily press gives us more clues as well as the social and cultural climate of the early seventies in Greece. John, a mentally ill but also an acute person, lives at the margins of society. He fantasises of killing a woman so as to confirm his sexuality. He goes deeper into reality and confesses the murder. He assembles all the information and convinces everybody of his guilt. Everybody is enchanted by John. Marketaki with a clinical gaze connects schizophrenia with the social field in a skillful way. —tainiothiki.gr

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