★★☆☆☆ (2/5)
There is no question that Mara Luyten’s Ashes of Meridian aspires to the heights of Antonioni and Tarkovsky. Its stately long takes, sepulchral silences, and ostentatious framing are clearly intended to place it within the canon of austere European modernism. The problem is not ambition, but execution: for all its grandeur, the film collapses under the weight of its own pretensions.
At 191 minutes, Ashes of Meridian is a punishing experience,not in the productive, revelatory way its admirers claim, but in the sense of sheer tedium. The camera lingers endlessly on empty corridors and half-demolished buildings, as though duration alone were equivalent to profundity. Scenes drag past the point of meaning, demanding patience but offering precious little in return.
Eliza Kontos, a performer of immense subtlety in other contexts, is here reduced to a cipher. Her Alina registers as little more than a vessel for long silences and cryptic glances, her grief intellectualized to the point of emotional nullity. Adrien Vale fares somewhat better, but his archivist is given so little to do that his presence verges on ornamental. The much-praised “chemistry” between them is more imagined than felt; they move through the frame like curators of a museum no one visits.
The film’s most lauded moment,the projection of archival footage against collapsing architecture,epitomizes its weaknesses. Yes, the metaphor is clear, even heavy-handed: memory dissolving in real time. But the image is so baldly symbolic, so desperate in its reach for profundity, that it risks parody. One is reminded less of Antonioni’s enigmatic poetics than of a graduate thesis in visual anthropology.
Sound design, too, is freighted with self-conscious significance. Every scrape of paper and footstep is presented as if imbued with metaphysical weight. The absence of a proper score might be celebrated by devotees as ascetic rigor, but in practice it registers as a refusal to engage the audience’s emotional faculties.
There is, of course, an audience for this kind of cinema: the highbrow festival-goer eager to equate austerity with intelligence, opacity with depth. But strip away the rhetoric, and what remains is a hollow experience: a film that confuses stillness for seriousness, erasure for revelation.
Luyten is undeniably talented,her eye for composition is rigorous, her control over atmosphere impressive. Yet Ashes of Meridian ultimately feels less like a work of art than an act of curatorial self-display, a film that wants to be studied rather than seen. To recommend it unreservedly would be to mistake endurance for insight.
