VOD film review: Moon, 66 Questions
Review Overview
Lentzou's direction
8Kokkali's performance
8Script and soundtrack
8Matthew Turner | On 25, Jun 2022
Director: Jacqueline Lentzou
Cast: Sofia Kokkali, Lazaros Georgakopoulos, Maria Zorba, Nikitas Tsakiroglou, Isavella Boulai
Certificate: 12
Moon, 66 Questions is the debut feature from acclaimed Greek director Jacqueline Lentzou, who’s won multiple festival prizes for her short films. Set in present-day Athens, the film takes an intriguingly unconventional approach to a familiar story about the strained relationship between a father and daughter.
Sofia Kokkali plays Artemis, a twenty-something woman who returns to Athens in order to care for her estranged father, Paris (Lazaros Georgakopoulos), after he’s diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. The pair can barely speak to each other and it’s clear that Artemis harbours a great deal of resentment towards her father, but the frostiness between them begins to thaw, especially after she discovers his long-kept secret.
The title, Moon, 66 Questions, refers to a deck of Tarot cards that provides chapter titles for the story. Subtitled “a film about love, movement, flow (and the lack of them)”, the film often feels like a collection of vignettes, mostly involving Artemis just hanging out in what used to be her childhood home. These scenes are occasionally interspersed with home movie footage from the 1990s, which are overlaid with read-aloud diary entries that don’t correspond to the footage.
Those techniques give Lentzou’s direction a disorienting feel that works well, reflecting both Artemis’ emotional confusion and the central difficulty of communication. Consequently, the script doesn’t feel the need to spell everything out, allowing the audience to work out certain things for themselves.
Kokkali is terrific in the lead role, her face seemingly in perpetual flow between petulant young child and adult woman forced to accept responsibility. This is encapsulated in a powerful sequence where she revisits an old argument between her father and her teenage self, acting out both parts, and her own recreation of her father’s rage reduces her to floods of pitiful tears.
Lentzou packs the film with great little scenes with a surprising amount of gentle humour in the mix, whether it’s Artemis performing a dance routine while washing the car – relating the details of a psychologically complex dream to an unexpected audience – or bursting into laughter with her father while eating ice cream. Lentzou also has a good eye for arresting detail – in one scene, the entire family gather to watch Paris’ very intimate physio session. That’s strange enough in itself, but it’s heightened by the fact that a blank-faced teenager is eating a packet of crisps throughout.
The film also benefits from a number of eclectic soundtrack choices, most of which are integrated into the script, including Bomfunk MC’s Freestyler (the hip-hop track Artemis dances to) and Tzeni Vanou’s Ase Me Na Figo, a track she pulls from her father’s record collection, in a beautifully directed, low-key scene that sweetly suggests she wants to attempt to get to know him better.
This review was originally published during the 2022 Glasgow Film Festival.