Echoes of the Past – review

Those dastardly Germans: first they massacre innocent men, women and children in Kalavryta in 1943 and then, nearly 80 years later, they send their fancy EU lawyers to argue against paying reparations to the Greek government.

The argument, as it goes, is that the modern German state is not a successor state to the Third Reich – which seems like a fair argument, really, since the Nazis overthrew the legitimate German government in a coup d’etat, and then after the war the country was dissolved into four zones of influence and only reunified in 1989. But Germany’s lawyer, Caroline Martin, is a likeable character and the film is a Greek production and so, as her investigation continues and she looks further into the 1943 atrocity, she becomes increasingly sympathetic to the Greek government’s cause and essentially attempts to make her own reparations, German government be damned.

All that is well and good. But the film’s real selling point is the deathbed performance of Max von Sydow. For once cast as victim and not villain, he is the emotional bedrock on which the film’s plot is built. The experience of watching this great screen presence seeming to waste away before one’s very eyes is voyeuristically alarming, and earns the film most of its key moments – moments that might otherwise comes across as sentimental, or trite, especially its moving final sequence.