Stelios review - Athenian rhapsody in blues

The English title of a new film about the legendary singer-guitarist Stelios Kazantzidis, who popularised rebetiko, which is often called “the Greek blues”, may beguile some cinemagoers into thinking they are about to watch a biopic of the Cypriot entrepreneur, Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou, the founder of EasyJet. Luckily, Stelios is much more interesting than that.

In Greece, where it has already smashed box-office records, the movie is entitled Iparho (“I Exist”) after a much-loved song by Kazantzidis, who is generally thought to be the Hellenic Republic’s answer to Frank Sinatra.

Rather like Uberto Pasolini’s recent beefcake bonanza, The Return, the veteran director Yorgos Tsemberopoulos’s film celebrates a Greek tradition of exile and nostalgia that goes back to Homer’s Odyssey, and suggests that even now, a quarter of a century after his death in 2001, Kazantzidis, who embodied the punk spirit of rebetiko, is as important to Greece as Sinatra or Elvis Presley is to the United States.

In a nutshell, rebetiko is the folk music of the Greek underground, a rebellious urban blues, with the bouzouki as its main instrument, which developed in the 1920s around the ports of Piraeus and Thessaloniki after the immigration of two million Greek refugees from Asia Minor following defeat in the Greco-Turkish War.

Kazantzidis, who was known as the “singer of exile” because his songs reflected the experience of those migrants, was the son of Pontic exiles from Anatolia, and he learned to sing rebetiko – a “rebetis” is an outcast or a vagabond – in the refugee camps that sprang up around Athens. As with American blues music, the songs chart the difficulties of working-class life, the sorrows of love, the anguish and disillusionment of poverty and social injustice, the loneliness and persecution of immigrants: “The passport is bitter like a poison/but when you live without hope, anywhere on earth is home,” Kazantzidis sang in his 1964 hit “The Passport”. Yet rebetiko is seldom moralistic. Its signature style, which, in the film, we see Kazantzidis learning from his mother (Agoritsa Oikonomou), derives from a tone of lament, a klama, or crying.

The star of Stelios, Christos Mastoras, who is himself the lead singer of Greek pop (laïko) group Melisses, catches this declamatory technique almost perfectly – unlike Rami Malek, say, who didn’t actually sing in the Oscar-winning musical biopic Bohemian Rhapsody – and his vocal performance of Kazantzidis’s greatest hits is undoubtedly a highlight of Tsemberopoulos’s film, often communicating the pain of separation and betrayal with little more than the articulation of a vowel sound.

Unfortunately Mastoras’s acting isn’t quite up to Malek’s standards – and the film, with its screenplay by Katerina Bei, stumbles whenever the music stops. The problem here is that Kazantzidis is a Greek national hero, and just as the saying “Never meet your heroes” is probably good advice, the cinematic equivalent (“Never make biopics of your heroes”) also holds true. Stelios is not quite a hagiography because the filmmakers at least understand that in rebetiko, as in the blues itself, the devil always has the best tunes. However, Kazantzidis’s punk spirit is missing from the film, except in the musical numbers.

In real life, Kazantzidis struggled with his demons. Yet, in Stelios, they barely get a walk-on in the mise en scène. The film unfolds as a series of flashbacks recalled by Kazantzidis during an interview with a young journalist who tracks the singer down to the remote fishing village of Aghios Konstantinos after he’s renounced his career in the 1970s.

The remembered details of his childhood – moments, sensations and images – have an arbitrary poetic authenticity. Stelios is orphaned as a teenager when his father Haralambos (George Adamantiadis), a Communist partisan, is beaten to death by right-wing thugs during the Greek Civil War. Subsequently young Stelios provides for his mother and younger brother by selling cigarettes in Athens’s Omonia Square, then working in a textile mill. One day, after hearing him sing while spinning yarn, the factory’s boss (Fotis Petridis) gives him a guitar, which Stelios learns to play in his spare time, eventually making his first public appearance at a night club in the early 1950s and later collaborating with some of Greece’s finest composers such as Vassilis Tsitsanis, Manos Hadjidakis and Mikis Theodorakis, while also having tempestuous love affairs with two of his backing singers, Kaiti Gray (Klelia Renesi) and Marinella (Asimenia Voulioti), who become icons of Greek popular music in their own right.

In spite of earning dozens of gold and platinum records, Kazantzidis is indifferent to the trappings of fame and, at the peak of his career, he decides to stop making records, accusing the label of enslaving him with its contracts.

Sinatra once said that if Kazantzidis had been born in America, he would have had an even more successful career than Ol’ Blue Eyes himself. Yet the sonorous childlike expression of hurt that was such a key component of his art also also drove Kazantzidis to walk away from the limelight. “My whole life is a heavy duty/It takes everything from me, it gives me nothing,” he sings in “My Whole Life” by Akis Panou, perhaps evoking his dead father’s romanticism.

And the standout moment in the film is Kazantzidis’s sudden awful conviction, as he dangles a line from the fishing boat, that childhood memories are always more real than adult memories because, like songs, they are detached from any context. That may even be why they exist in the first place – and why they have such a mysterious force. Stelios ends on a high note, literally and figuratively – which is to say, it ends with a klama: “I’m the beginning and the end,” Kazantzidis sings on the 1975 classic “Iparho” (by Christos Nikolopoulos and Pythagoras Papastamatiou), “And I will never be forgotten/I exist.”

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