Nikos Nikolaidis is a controversial director. Marked by a strong generational and ideological feeling, he viscerally rejects (and in Nikolaidis' work this visceral is sometimes even literal) capitalism, in a way that oscillates between mere sociological criticism peppered by sometimes quite violent metaphors, a moral support for urban guerrilla warfare and even the use of very dubious metaphors and pornographic aesthetics as in his most infamous work Singapore Sling (1990).
In this Ta kourelia tragoudane akoma...(1979) we have a Nikolaidis manifestly disillusioned with aging (in a very likely allusion to the republican regime that followed the dictatorship in 1975 and that led Greece to NATO and the EEC and not to Moscow) and the lack of options for his generation to live the dreams of youth.
Dreams and friendships are dying, with corpses literally piling up in the backyard, in a metaphor of an almost gratuitous violence, and the old revolutionaries are left with two options, to die faithful to their ideals (option of some) or to become bourgeois by integrating in the regime and abdicating their principles, which amounts to a spiritual death.
It is therefore a dark and disillusioned film where physical violence appears as a metaphor for the psychological and moral death of the characters and the current political regime.
An intelligent and interesting vision, but one that certainly does not generate consensus.
