When Patrikios (Christos Stergioglou), onetime/longtime physician to Marcos Timoleon (Willem Dafoe), an Aristotle Onassis-inspired Greek titan of industry and all-around oligarch, casually suggests the latter’s resemblance behavior-wise to Marlon Brando’s title character in The Godfather, Marcos laughs, instead suggesting the voracious, flesh-eating shark in Jaws as a better comparison to how he lives and comports himself on the private island that doubles as Marcos's personal fiefdom.
Both, it turns out, aptly describe the autocratic, imperious Marcos and his plans for his family over an all-expenses-paid weekend celebration.
There’s no half-man, half-bull Minotaur or an actual labryinth in The Birthday Party, writer-director Miguel Ángel Jiménez's (Window to the Sea) adaptation of Panos Karnezis’s well-regarded 2007 novel, but there is Marcos: a self-made man, a king in all but official title, wielding his wealth, power, and influence with an ease and dexterity of someone accustomed to a position of near-absolute authority over his business associates, circle of so-called friends, casual acquiantances, and what’s left of his immediate family: Sofia (Vic Carmen Sonne), his about-to-turn-25 daughter back home for the first time in four years, and the Spanish-born Olivia (Emma Suárez), his soon-to-be-ex-wife.
Whatever humanity Marcos once possessed all but disappeared with the death of his son and heir. In Marcos’s circa '70s eyes, Sofia represents his sole remaining legacy. But an old-school, casually sexist, borderline misogynistic patriarch through and through, Marcos only sees Sofia as a daughter to be protected from her worst choices (drugs, partying, the wrong men) and solidifying his legacy through a marriage of convenience, a business arrangement that will bring not just a grandchild to ensure his immortality, but the continuation of the multinational corporations he built from the ground up, albeit with the sometimes tacit, sometimes open support of Greek’s military junta.
The alliance Marcos envisons connects both multinational interests and fascist ones, too, aligning the avowedly amoral Marcos with Spain’s ruling elite and with them, the declining health and fortunes of Spain’s dictator, Generalissimo Francisco Franco. (Franco would eventually meet his ancestors on November 20th, 1975.) Marcos, however, sees little risk or danger in Franco’s impending demise, just temporary obstacles and obstructions to a plan where Sofia has no agency or autonomy of her own, just his superseding his daughter’s.
The central conflict in The Birthday Party turns on the ruthless, intractable Marcos and Sofia, a young adult who’s tasted freedom and independence abroad and has envisioned an entirely different future for herself. Sofia imagines a future involving Ian Forster (Joe Cole), not coincidentally Marcos’ biographer and Sofia’s lover, motherhood and marriage (not necessarily in that order), and a life far away from her father’s overbearing control and the island she rightly perceives not as a paradise or sanctuary but as a cage or prison.
While the culmination of that conflict, preordained by the enormous imbalance in Marcos and Sofia’s turbulent relationship, powers the narrative, it also loses momentum as Sofia’s two-day birthday celebration devolves into the last rites for her independence and self-determination. Instead, it’s a reaffirmation, a reconfirmation of Marcos’s cruel, single-minded ruthlessness, his transactional worldview: Everything — and more importantly, everyone, including Sofia — is either a benefit or a hazard, a positive or a negative in an invisible ledger he keeps in mind. Everyone, especially everyone in his inner circle, has a price. It’s only a matter of negotiating said price in exchange for their dignity, integrity, and principles once held, but now easily purchased with a lump sum and a signature on a contract.
Before The Birthday Party slips into a disappointingly permanent longeuer in the last act, it effortlessly coasts along on the strength of Jiménez’s unobtrusive direction, Gris Jordana’s sun-drenched cinematography, period-specific Euro-melodies, and, of course, an international cast led by Dafoe, delivering a richly textured, layered turn as the tyrannical Marcos, Danish actress Vic Carmen Sonne as Sofia, and a uniformly talented cast in support of Jiménez’s otherwise sturdy, well-made adaptation of Karnezis’s novel.
The Birthday Party premiered at the 78th Locarno Film Festival. The film opens today in movie theaters, and is also available On Demand and On Digital, via Quiver Distribution.