A middle-aged but still very beautiful, dark-haired woman sits before a mirror admiring her reflection as she puts on the finishing touches of makeup. Through the mirror's view we see a young boy's eyes piercing the reflection of the woman.
Noticing his glance, she playfully scolds the child, stating that he knows better than to watch her while she is applying her makeup. The child contests that he isn't looking at her but at her reflection, a disparity the woman rejects. For her, the act of applying makeup is a literal transformation -- a practice her son, as we learn, is visibly irritated by.
Their conversation could be read literally, a simple anecdote that establishes their mother-son relationship. Upon further consideration, it is no coincidence that George Lazopoulos' 1998 horror-fantasy, Medousa, would open in such a manner, for this scene sets up the complex world in which the entire film will unfold its psychoanalytical, modern spin on the age-old Medusa myth. The divide between men and women, beauty and ugliness, dream and reality, knowledge and ignorance, and strength and weakness are among the dichotomies that Lazopoulos fills his confident, nuanced debut (and, to this day, sole) feature film. Medousa is a modern twist on the titular myth that blends its epic roots with a healthy dose of gothic horror and neo-noir to create a surreal and singular experience.
Click though the gallery below to read more about George Lazopoulos and Medousa.
"I grew up in a middle class family and I was kind of destined to go to the University. Because of my family background, that wasn't really a choice. It just happened out of its own, so to speak. I was expected to have a career," Lazopoulos responds to questions of his upbringing. He states that as a child he didn't have artistic ambitions, he just followed the path he believed was expected of him. At the same time, he was struggling to come to terms with his political identity. So Lazopoulos picked up Economics, believing that it would be applicable to his developing worldview:
"I was kind of a Marxist at the time, so [studying Economics] was related to that. I guess you can say I wasn't really a Marxist but more of an Anarchist; I studied Marx in order to reject him and not because I agreed with what he said. Looking back, I wasn't really a Marxist -- and if I am to speak right now, I wasn't really an Anarchist, but that is what I thought at the time."
However, it wasn't in Marx, economics, or anarchist literature that Lazopoulos would find his great inspiration, but a few years before in the back of a movie theater. A screening of Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars would have a profound effect on him, but not for most apparent reasons. Despite the clear leftist political allegories concealed within many Spaghetti Westerns -- albeit more dulled in Leone's own films compared to his contemporaries -- Lazopoulos was completely oblivious to their political nature. In fact, he was, at first, embarrassed to admit he liked the movie that he saw as pure entertainment. A Fistful of Dollars was a 'genre' film, it wasn't the kind of films that intellectuals were to enjoy; as he explains:
"Maybe it is a bit difficult to understand Greece at that time but there were things just for entertainment -- like A Fistful of Dollars -- and there were the so-called serious films or serious books. There was a very clear dividing line between those two. I was 16 years old, I thought I should be reading Dostoevsky or seeing a film by Bertolucci or something; that was the trend and that is what I thought I was supposed to do. So when I saw A Fistful of Dollars and I liked it -- and I liked it so much that I saw it a second and a third time -- it was a conflict inside me. I shouldn't really like it, I thought. I couldn't accept that I really liked it, but I slowly came to terms with it."
Cinema stuck with Lazopoulos, and when economics, and then psychology, failed him, he enrolled in film school. "I was drawn to existentialism. People like Albert Camus, Dostoevsky, of course. When I started getting interested in cinema it was films like Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari that were much more real to me than Marxism or anarchy."
For Lazopoulos, film is a dream. "While I was studying Psychology, I became interested in dreams and that is the main thing that draws me to film because, for me, films are dreams. Film language is a kind of dream language. I want the plot and characters to be real but I want there to be a dream quality. I don't want to make a dream into a film; I want to show life in a dreamy way."
This view is the key to unlocking Lazopoulos' sole film. It's not that Medousa is overly complex; it's that it doesn't present itself in a manner of the typical genre film. While this is the Achilles heel of many films, it serves as Medousa's greatest strength, because, while the film is far from flawless, it emerges as a fascinating composite of styles and ideas, presented in a cohesive and beautiful manner.
Medousa cherry picks from the classic myth, taking the elements that fit a modern context and dispelling those that do not. In the film's prologue, Perseus is taken away from the city by his mother to live with her fiancé and his ghastly sister in rural Greece. He adapts to his newfound life until the day that his mother mysteriously vanishes. Ten years later, Perseus has worked his way up the ladder of the seedy underbelly. When by chance his partners in crime, a group of radical punks/metalheads living a faux-anarchist lifestyle but driven by capitalist desires, target his childhood home for their next robbery, Perseus is faced once again with the mystery of his mother's disappearance.
Like most mythology, fate plays an important role in Medousa. This is the distinction that sets it apart from the typical horror film, where character's actions lead to their outcomes. The characters in Medousa, rather, are driven by a sense of preconceived determination. Lazopoulos' script is tight and most elements introduced come back into play in a crucial way. These fated results work in favor of the film's benefit. One of the most important of these aspects concerns Perseus' evolution to hero. Rather than don a sword as did his literary basis, Perseus is drawn to knives from a young age. His fascination leads him to train under a local knife thrower, and, over time, he masters the art of blind knife throwing. When Perseus finally comes into contact with Medusa in the climax, it is this skill that serves to help him defeat her.
If modernized mythology serves as the basis for an important arc of the story, Lazopoulos complicates the narrative structure by adding a secondary police procedural arc. This secondary plot line deals with a team of detectives who end up on the tail of Medusa when her petrified victims start showing up all around Greece. Medousa's police-procedural element also imbues the film with a neo-noir aspect. A style fitting for the resurgence of interest for the genre in the 1990s, and heightened by Vassilis Kapsouros's colorful and gritty cinematography.
With influences ranging from Dario Argento to German Expressionism, the film has a notably anachronistic feel to it, where it looks as if it could have just as likely been shot in 1970 or 1980 as it was in 1998. This was Lazopoulos' goal, as he felt that the film would gain from not being fixed in either time or place: "I didn't really want to say anything about current times. I wanted Medousa to have an appearance of today but it wasn't really specific; it could be anytime. I never liked to fix things in time or place."
Lazopoulos gripes that Kapsouros didn't completely understand his vision, but it is hard to say that this concern is visible in the final product. In fact, the resulting effort is quite beautiful to look at -- a fact that is best represented in the eerie and ever-effective special effects shot of the transformation-to-stone scene.
With the obvious cultural connection aside, it is most likely in psychology that Lazopoulos first bore the ideas that would lead him to write and direct Medousa. In a brief sketch in Collected Papers, Freud equated Medusa with castration fears. It is no shock, then, to see the engaging way in which gender is utilized within Lazopoulos' film. While the film is clearly indebted to Freud, it thankfully does more to adopt its own worldview than it does to simply regurgitate psychoanalytical allusions. Lazopoulos' most ingenious play on gender turns the vampire myth onto the Medusa figure, inventing a new myth for which the film unfolds. Thus, Lazopoulos' own Medusa-complex is a female-centric enigma that destroys men and converts women.
It is possible to read this play on gender in two ways. It admittedly does work in some unflattering allusions to the iconic vamp figure. On the other hand, however, the Medusa is a symbol of female power; both of these views overlook notions of biologically determined gender, which, important as it is today, was clearly not on the radar of the film's aim. Lazopoulos' biggest change to the Medusa myth addresses the power of her gaze over female victims. A glance at Medusa's face has the power to cast men into stone as it did in the original variations of the myth. When gazing upon a woman, however, Medusa's power is transfigured to her prey, simultaneously cursing and gifting them with immense force.
When asked about the reasons behind the gendered results of Medusa's stare, Lazopoulos responds: "I would be glad to say it was something more than a plot device [laughs] but it is not. It is actually the vampire theme -- where the vampire identity can be transferred -- combined with the original myth." Yet, when pressed further, he begins to concede that perhaps he had more on his mind than simply pushing forward the plot, "to be transferred only between women, that was kind of new. It was obligatory in a way; it couldn't be a man. It wouldn't fit with anything. It does have to do with women. Women are presented as powerful and men, men are strong maybe -- maybe they can kill -- but they are a brute force."
When pieced together with the clear phallic imagery of Perseus's obsession with knives, it's apparent that Lazopolous' Freudian studies found their way into the script. Like Freud's own work, which was later rejected and/or reenvisioned by feminist writers like Hélène Cixous and Julia M. Walker, Lazopoulos's own rumination on Medusa leaves room for conversation; opening more doors than it closes.
If you have just discovered or heard about Medousa for the first time with Mondo Macabro's DVD release, you aren't alone. After completing photography, the film played a handful of festivals -- including taking home a prize at the World-Houston festival -- and then all but disappeared.
Lazopoulos blames the limited exposure on his inexperience: "I didn't have anybody to sell the film and I am not good at selling things." But as he continues, it becomes clear that perhaps its failure was not solely on his back: "In Greece at the time, there was no interest for such subjects and themes. Nobody cared. I remember a producer who told me, 'Congratulations, you had the courage to make a film that nobody cares about.' The very concept of Medousa, fantasy or horror -- and forget whether the film was good or bad -- nobody cared about. It wasn't a good time for filmmakers in Greece."
Since Medousa's failed release, Lazopoulos has primarily worked in advertising but his desire to make films has never gone away. "It was very difficult to try and get another film made. Nobody appreciated Medousa really. It was also a question of money, and I'm not good at finding money. But, I always have a desire to make another movie. It's kind of a disease, you never get rid of it."
The recent DVD release of the film from Mondo Macabro marks one of the first efforts any distributor has paid to the film. While Lazopoulos jokes he doesn't believe the release will generate any new fans, he does look back fondly on the work. "There is nothing that I would make differently and that's really funny because I am not a person that is super sure of himself or something," he says. "When I do something, many times I think, 'Oh my God, I should have done it differently or better.' But I never had such thoughts about Medousa. It is perfect in my mind. Not really perfect but perfect compared to me. I did what I could and I couldn't do anything better."
The DVD is available from Mondo Macabro.
Medousa_teaser trailer from Pete Tombs on Vimeo.