“Pity,” the second feature from Greek filmmaker Babis Makridis, begins and ends with the sight and sounds of a weeping man, and in between is divided into chapters through aggressive use of intertitles. Their ubiquity recalls the rhythm of a silent film, with every action articulated in plain sight for viewer comprehension; the first appearance of an intertitle suggests poetry as a means of introduction, but with every appearance thereafter we realize that Makridis is simply plucking thoughts from his protagonist’s head and placing them on-screen to spare the audience the chore of mind reading. Calling this element superfluous would mean declaring the obvious, so let’s just call it frustrating instead.
That’s the right word for qualifying the film at large. “Pity” slow-rolls, building a head of steam over its first twenty minutes and fully embracing its black comic promise for the next forty or so before going overboard in its final thirty. Dark humor is still humor, but there’s a difference between morbid jokes and emotional violence. Makridis either doesn’t know the difference or he doesn’t care; “Pity” mines laughter from awkward narcissism before making an abrupt pivot toward the macabre sans punchlines. Think of it as a mismatched combination of Greek cinema as represented by Athina Rachel Tsangari and Yorgos Lanthimos (you might as well: “Pity” is written by Efthymis Filippou, who has worked extensively with both of them.)
Tsangari’s last film, 2016’s excellent “Chevalier,” examines overbearing machismo with satiric determination. Lanthimos’ last two films, being “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” and “The Lobster,” try the satire thing, too, but they’re mannered, intentionally mechanical, and tend to shed blood as often as they try to get us to chuckle through discomfort. “Pity” falls somewhere in between, which makes its habit of pole vaulting from one mode to the other, back and forth and back and forth, especially jarring. The film has an identity problem. It’s uncertain what it wants to be. This is too damn bad because its first mode, a parody of male self-obsession, is perfectly satisfying; the comedy makes us shift in our seats, but the shifting is pleasurable, complemented by well-timed gags and a mesmerizingly selfish performance from its leading man, Yannis Drakopoulos.
You may recognize Drakopoulos from his work in “Chevalier.” Here, he plays a lawyer without a name — he’s credited simply as “Lawyer” — whose wife (Evi Saoulidou), credited simply as “Wife,” is in a coma following a nasty accident. Lawyer has lived in a perpetual state of grief since her hospitalization, and we quickly come to find that he’s become addicted to his sadness. “The expression that people adopt when they feel pity for someone is an expression that is hard for them to replicate, if you ask them to,” says the opening title card. “They usually flutter their eyelids, lower their head, and say ‘I don’t know what to say,’ ‘courage,’ ‘patience,’ or something like that.” “Pity” bears out this adage immediately, with supporting characters, including a dry cleaner played by another “Chevalier” vet, Makis Papadimitriou, who feeds Lawyer’s hunger for the sympathy of others without quite realizing it.
Such is Lawyer’s habit. His neighbor routinely brings him Bundt cakes, his secretary gives him a shoulder to cry on when he needs it, and his dad checks his hair for signs of whitening even though there clearly aren’t any. The guy joneses for any dose of condolence he can get. At first his cravings are, well, pitiable, falling well within expected bounds. His wife is comatose. That’s a tough hand to be dealt. (Tougher for her, naturally, but nevertheless tough on him too.) As the film carries on, those cravings become amusing, equally as benign as they are asinine. We buy his schtick. We buy the jokes Makridis sells us. While working on a murder case, Lawyer decides to reenact the scene in his office as described by the victim’s daughter, heavy metal music blaring, his secretary screaming, his hand thrusting back and forth in a stabbing motion. This probably doesn’t read as funny on paper, but in practice it’s close to hysterical.
“Pity” gets even better halfway through its running time, when Wife recovers and Lawyer’s life is complete. Except it isn’t. He’s missing sorrow. The film hits its peak as he runs around looking for woes that don’t exist: He encourages Wife to get a mammogram, he frets over the length of his sons’ fingers impeding his career as a pianist, and he lies, lies, lies to keep up that sweet flow of empathy from strangers. If Makridis knew enough to stop there, “Pity” would have worked wonderfully, but he doesn’t, and he ruins the movie by taking it to unnecessarily dark places. It’s not the darkness that’s at issue. It’s the lack of cohesion between the darkness and the antics preceding it. The film arrives at a third act conclusion so tonally out of sync with its first and second acts, you’ll feel like you wandered into a completely different theater and watched the ending of a completely different movie.
“Pity” is ugly enough without demanding ugly excess from its characters. Like the intertitles Makridis bestrews throughout the film, the depths he plumbs are redundant. (For honesty’s sake, they’re deeply upsetting, too, which may work for some and not at all for others.) Lawyer is the architect of his sustained anguish. He’s a terrible, greedy man capable only of thinking about himself. We get it. “Pity” is shaped with language to enforce that image, particularly long, static takes that linger on his impassive face. Blank stares can’t veil Lawyer’s fundamental desires. Lawyer is on the hunt for his next hit, whether in the form of cakes, hugs, or empty expressions of kindness. A film made with greater restraint would understand his motivation as self-evident. “Pity” isn’t that film. [C+]
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