Widowed Andrea and her young son live on a remote Greek Island. One day, walking on the beach, they come across a strange man washed up, who cannot remember anything. Who is he, where did he come from, and why is he here ?
This is an odd movie, a quirky Christ allegory with some time travelling thrown in. I guess it's not very good - it looks cheap, it lacks passion, it has too many travelogue shots to pad its running time and it doesn't really make any sense. Despite all that, I really like it, for several reasons. It was shot in the south-eastern Greek island of Mykonos in the Aegean Sea, and the location is original and incredibly beautiful. The cast give strange stilted but hypnotic performances; Dullea is brilliantly iconic, the perfect actor to play a messianic failure, Barbeau is achingly melancholy, Licht (the scary kid from Joe Dante's segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie) is goofy fun and Hobbs is great as the drunken idealistic doctor. Hobbs has impressive cult-movie credentials; check him out in The Andromeda Strain, Sleeper, Wizards, John Carpenter's Elvis TV-movie and The Man With Two Brains. Mastorakis may be a bit of a hack, but the movie keeps coming up with offbeat and interesting ideas and shots, like the moment when Dullea walks into a library and hears the books talking to him in his head. There's also a nice mellow score by the underrated Stanley Myers (Nicolas Roeg's composer of choice). Mastorakis is an unusual, marginal filmmaker, but he made some curios, notably the techno-mystery Blind Date and survival thriller The Zero Boys. I guess I'm maybe overrating this movie a little but it's something different and that always counts for a lot in my book. In her enjoyable autobiography, There Are Worse Things I Could Do, Barbeau doesn't even mention it despite making it at the height of her fame, so I guess she slept through it, but it's really rather good. The Greek title is O Taxidiotis Tou Hronou / The Traveller In Time.
This is an odd movie, a quirky Christ allegory with some time travelling thrown in. I guess it's not very good - it looks cheap, it lacks passion, it has too many travelogue shots to pad its running time and it doesn't really make any sense. Despite all that, I really like it, for several reasons. It was shot in the south-eastern Greek island of Mykonos in the Aegean Sea, and the location is original and incredibly beautiful. The cast give strange stilted but hypnotic performances; Dullea is brilliantly iconic, the perfect actor to play a messianic failure, Barbeau is achingly melancholy, Licht (the scary kid from Joe Dante's segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie) is goofy fun and Hobbs is great as the drunken idealistic doctor. Hobbs has impressive cult-movie credentials; check him out in The Andromeda Strain, Sleeper, Wizards, John Carpenter's Elvis TV-movie and The Man With Two Brains. Mastorakis may be a bit of a hack, but the movie keeps coming up with offbeat and interesting ideas and shots, like the moment when Dullea walks into a library and hears the books talking to him in his head. There's also a nice mellow score by the underrated Stanley Myers (Nicolas Roeg's composer of choice). Mastorakis is an unusual, marginal filmmaker, but he made some curios, notably the techno-mystery Blind Date and survival thriller The Zero Boys. I guess I'm maybe overrating this movie a little but it's something different and that always counts for a lot in my book. In her enjoyable autobiography, There Are Worse Things I Could Do, Barbeau doesn't even mention it despite making it at the height of her fame, so I guess she slept through it, but it's really rather good. The Greek title is O Taxidiotis Tou Hronou / The Traveller In Time.