No Budget Story - Original Film HD, ©Renos Haralambidis 1997 скачать в хорошем качестве

No Budget Story - Original Film HD, ©Renos Haralambidis 1997

VARIETY No Budget Story is an amusing meditation on the familiar theme of a young director trying to get his first film financed. Like last year’s Italo effort “The Reel,” it makes a virtue of necessity, using its own poverty to give the film atmosphere. This is the epitome of a niche product, one that will have to struggle valiantly to find the right audience outside festivals. Wannabe director Irineos (Renos Haralambidis, pic’s own first-time helmer) is approaching 30, has four unsold scripts in hand, and is being kicked out of his apartment for not paying the rent. When his mother places a “looking for a producer” newspaper ad in his name, he gets a call from a soft-hearted maker of porn flicks (Yannis Bostantzoglou) and together they decide to shoot a love story. While waiting to go into production, Irineos shoots a no-budget TV commercial, washes windows and falls in love with his would-be leading lady (Dimitra Papadima). For a Greek film, pic is a surprisingly hip tongue-in-cheek comedy and a huge leap forward from most of the country’s lugubrious Angelopoulos imitations. Shot on Betacam video and blown up to 35mm — and using professional thesps but giving them ample space for improvisation — pic is more a salute to cheeky American indies than anything else. Haralambidis, who is a professional actor, engages the viewer’s sympathy through sheer pluckiness. As the producer and his sidekick, Bostantzoglou and Yorgos Voltzatis — stocky and earnest in their Hawaiian shirts — comically embody the stereotype of producers as sentimental gangsters. All that is missing from this enjoyable effort is a sense of the deep frustration and pain most aspiring directors go through. Irineos’ commitment to his multiple projects seems questionable when he starts tearing up his scripts in a fit of depression, and his attempts to shoot a home-made sci-fi picture without sound or lights, not to mention special effects, keeps filmmaking on the level of a joke rather than a vocation. But suffering apart, pic is a promising start for an out–of–the–way director. VARIETY by Deborah Young