Bordello (1985)

A highly stylized and allegorical, but visually sumptuous work. Bordello is about as far from Koundouros' early neorealist style films as one can get. The costumes and makeup in here are enough to make Fellini blush. In an odd move, the dialogue oscillates between English, Greek, Russian, and possibly a few other tongues, while the intertitles are all in English. Furthermore, there are no subtitles, and it does not seem like there ever were. Was this an artistic choice on Koundouros' part? An internet search yielded no answers. My assumption is that Koundouros was aiming to create the feeling of a fractured world, because the dialogue I did understand was highly cryptic. But the visuals really carry this one, and once I got past the linguistic confusion, I found myself hypnotized by this surreal and fantastical version of the past cooked up here. The colors are lush, the set-pieces baroque and exotic, and there is, of course given the setting of a brothel, generous amounts of nudity. At times when things started becoming too stylized, Koundouros pulled them back into a more grounded and emotional realm. This really is a special film, and though I cannot say I understood it, it is definitely a masterpiece of some sort.