made with
sorry for the mistakes!
The Cerimony
Opening on a sunset of what we will discover is the sea of Ithaca.
Images like postcards, even with the horrendous version of the film I'm
watching, I think ripped from a vhs. Then, immediately afterwards, a
girl is engaged in backlighting in an act of autoeroticism on the
rocks, while a voice speaks of her lustful desires. Not only that, the
voice also tells us how simple (and lustful) the inhabitants of this
beautiful island are, where you can obviously have sex on the beach.
Meanwhile, the girl continues. Panorama. Tourists arrive including
Maria from Athens.
But what exactly does this 1979 film want to tell? The director is the
good Omiros Efstratiadis and therefore it is likely that we are in an
erotic movie, which is also an excellent spot (for the time) for the
Greek islands and for the physical and mental goodness of its
inhabitants. But as this thought spreads, a turning point comes. Two
guys, Stefanos and Aris tired of life on the island and ambitious to go
to Athens steal, with Maria, the icon of the local church. Vassilis the
switchboard operator of the island intercepts them and again, while you
think this is the hero of the film, he blackmails Mary of Athens and
takes a lot of blows and ends up segregated with Maria who annoys him
heavily.
It can be said that "The Cerimony" is a film, yes, erotic, with a vague
crime side that travels with a much more powerful psychological aspect
that involves the three villains, especially Stefanos and Aris, who for
the record, hide themselves in the island with the police looking for
them.
Ithaca could suggest a parallelism with the famous legend of Ulysses,
with the two who maybe "get lost in life and then find the right way
giving back the icon" but it is naturally too much and the protagonists
randomly shoot the names of the characters of the Odyssey while on the
screen Stefano, Aris, Marie and two other girls willingly undress and
have sex almost everywhere. The bad guys are then arrested.
The original title is "Erotiki teleti" literally "erotic
ceremony”, with the usual hard version with added scenes. It must
be said that this is a b movie that give some hopes in the beginning
and whose bad editing involuntarily creates an effect sometimes like an
author's cinema. Only sometimes, however, the only constant is the
beauty of Ithaca.
