Gi ll ian Bouras The dance goes on Forty years after she first saw the film Zorba the Greek, an Australian in Greece takes a second look and finds herself deeply shocked E.n Y
Mikis, and built on a grand scale, as so many Cretans are. Either a statue or a god. Looking at that shaggy leonine head, I for one felt that he could easily have flown in from Olympus just for the occasion. IN 1980 THERE WERE NO such things as video shops in nearby Kalamata; now anyone viewing the Zorba film in maturity would be bound to agree. Crete's form 'is austere. Furrowed by struggles and pain.' Now the quite terrifying struggles and pain are what I take from the film, which could only have been shot in black and white: God forbid any attempt at a remake of any sort; colour would be unthinkable. Forty years on I know that the crop Zorba announces that life is trouble; only death is not. A man needs a little madness; else, how is he ever going to break the thread that binds him, and be free! And he asks what Isaac Bashevis Singer called 'the eternal questions'. Why must we suffer! Why must we die! And the viewer can almost feel the constriction of Alan Bates's throat as he replies, I don't there are several. And so it came to pass that I recently watched the Zorba film again. This time I was not bowled over, at lea t not in the same way; instead, I was deeply shocked. There were all sorts of reasons for my shock, not the least of which was the sobering reminder of the protected, heedless girl I had been way back then, at the time of my first viewing. But over my long Greek years, of course, I had been forced to accept that the world I had once found so hard to believe in had actually existed. Although Kazantzakis's harsh Crete is a world or even a galaxy away from the Crete of the 21st century, with its glitzy tourist beaches and its overpoweringly opulent hotels, it still exists in remote corners. Only a few years ago, a half Greek friend of mine, a woman travelling on her own in Crete and well off the beaten tourist track, stopped for a drink at a kafeneion in a mountain village, and soon fell into conversation with two old men. Predictably, they wanted to know her life story, so she obliged with the potted version: Greek mother who had met father when he was in the British army and thus in Greece during the war; subsequent marriage, followed by the establishment of a family in London. 'We are glad and relieved to learn that you are Greek,' said the more communicative of the two. 'Because if you were a Turka, we should have to rape you.' Kazantzakis wrote his novel, and nearly ten years later was interviewed on Parisian radio. 'I don't see Crete as a picturesque, smiling place,' he said, and area of Crete is a mere three-eighths of its total area, and I have learned that there is nothing at all romantic or ennobling about poverty: in the film the village simpleton is the only person to keen over the body of the widow (Irene Pappas), a woman who was tender, generous and alone, and who was killed for her pride, for her rejection of an importunate local suitor who eventually suicided, and for choosing Alan Bates instead. After her murder outside the church, the rest of the village turned away in a kind of strategic indifference, the indifference of those who have obeyed the implacable rules applying to the vengeful concepts of honour and shame, and who then slope away in order to avoid whatever consequences might be in store. A lso SHOCKING, I THINK, is the examination of the inexorable power of desire: in the yearning of the widow, in the pathetic flirtatiousness of the faded coquette, Madame Hortense, in the amoral but somehow inspiring wretch that is Zorba himself. Kazantzakis was deeply interested in the conflict between mind and body; thus it was a master stroke to give the Alan Bates character an English upbringing but a Greek mother. This might seem a simple dichotomy, but there is rarely anything simplistic in Kazantzakis, and so the liberation of the bookish Englishman exacts a dreadful due. I was not shocked, merely very surprised to discover how much of the dialogue echoed within the ageing brain. know. Inevitably, Zorba cannot let this highly unsatisfactory answer pass. What use are all your damned books then, if they don't tell you this! What do they tell you! All Alan Bates can say is, They tell me of the agony of men who cannot answer your questions. Despite the harshness, suffering and savagery, there is still always the dancing, the method by which Zorba comes to terms with both death and life. To a Greek, dancing is both catharsis and celebration. Each part of Greece has its own traditional dances; here in the Peloponnese, men dance a slow solo zembeil
Change language