In the ancient myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, they fall in love and marry, but then Eurydice dies. Orpheus goes into the Underworld to win her back, but screws up and gets torn limb from limb, instead. Cheerful stuff!
I mention this because No Sympathy for the Devil is a Greek film ostensibly based on this tale. Of course, "Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy goes on quest to win her back" is hardly unique to Orpheus and Eurydice. The elements that make the legend unusual are the trip to the literal underworld, the "light and shadow" plot points that this introduces, and the tragic end. The film reinterprets
In this adaptation, our never-actually-named male lead meets Eurydice first on a train station platform, and then again when she tries to shoplift at the store where he works. For some reason, he is drawn to her, finding her "filled with light in a world of darkness". Exactly why she might be like that is (at best) cryptically explained by some interactions she has other characters, a notable proportion of which appear to involve her getting naked. I'm sure this was "vital to the Art", or something.
Anyway, our leads have a pill-popping sex session, lose consciousness, and are whisked off for treatment. Eurydice goes missing, and the male lead heads off to a strange new town, filled with weird and often hostile people, to find her.
This film reminded me a lot of the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet, and in particular his first film, The Immortal One. Like that film, it is about a man looking for a missing woman. Like that film, it is deliberately shot in black and white. Like that film, it's full of people talking very earnestly but very obliquely about things, and generally acting in strange and unexplained ways. It's all very consciously Artistic, in other words, and to my mind would frankly have benefited from being a lot more straightforward.
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