The Whisper Before the Screening
A wave of excitement began as soon as Pity popped up on the festival circuit. The director, Babis Makridis, had made a name for himself with L, and was now collaborating with Efthymis Filippou, the writer notorious for his partnerships with Yorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth, The Lobster).
The premise of the film was both potentially promising and disquieting. It centers on a middle-aged lawyer, a man whose life revolves and narrows down to a state of profound sadness. His wife is in a coma, and all the pity he garners from friends and strangers becomes his fuel. When, for better or for worse, she wakes up, the pity evaporates, and he panics. The concept of a man ensnared in the web of other peoples’ suffering was both absurd and painfully tangible.
Pity made its world premiere at Sundance in 2018, where it was a part of the World Cinema Dramatic competition and quickly gained a reputation as one of the festival’s most talked about films. The festival crowd speculated if it was another entry in the “Greek Weird Wave” — the bleakly humorous, dispassionate, and almost clinical films that provoke laughter and discomfort simultaneously. Would Pity fall more on the side of satire or tragedy?
Everyone has a story to tell, even Giannis in Pity. Giannis is a lawyer. As time goes on, Giannis has to deal with the heartache of seeing his wife in a coma. As time goes on, the sympathy is directed at him. For the people closest to him, the people who helplessly watch his wife in a coma, include him in their pity and give him sympathy. His new grief is emotionally solitary but in the early days, people bring him meals, and cakes, and show pity in a dozen other ways. After a couple of other weeks and with no sign of real understanding, pity grows from silence to a malevolent presence. It is as though the real cause of sympathy was his wife being in a coma, with her striking him a dualism of sympathy, and silence.
Finally, when his wife wakes up, it is time to grief all that was bitterly and sweetly, and silently, endured. Giannis’s grief now is real. Time with sympathy is over. Attention that was real is now gone. Cheer, and pity, have packed their things. To fill it, he begins to lie to everyone.
The haunting duality of his existence is, he works as a lawyer on a homicide line. His own desperate, and miserable, and authentic suffering has now become performative as, bereaved loved ones in revenge homicide wait for him with their pain.
What makes the story so unsettling is its location. Pity’s world is idyllic, calm, sunlit, and uneventful. The Lawyer occupies an apartment by the sea, and everything is bright, neat, and, above all, civilized. Yet, within the calm, emotional rot is festering. The disparity — beauty on the outside, inner barrenness — becomes the film’s silent scream.
The film’s strength is almost entirely down to Yannis Drakopoulos, who plays the lawyer and does so with an almost terrifying stillness. His features barely change, and yet, somehow, suffocating desperation emanates from him in every frame. He does not ask for sympathy; in silence, he demands it.
Drakopoulos’ background in Greek theatre and theatre more generally was the ideal preparation for this kind of performance. As he was known for minimalist acting, he was the ideal choice for a character who emotionally is in a slow-burn state. For him, the greater challenge was not to express sadness, but rather the obsession of an emotional addict — the idea that one can ever so profoundly lose oneself in a state of pity.
Director Babis Makridis expressed the desire to investigate how people become “addicted to sadness.” To him, sadness was not about tragedy, but rather the attention that tragedy brings. This was the idea that shaped Drakopoulos’ performance. He had to portray a man who confuses compassion for love, a man who holds onto sorrow, not realizing that it makes him visible.
Audience Reactions Spanning the Spectrum
Upon the film’s public debut, Pity elicited uncensored laughter and cringing at the same time. The film’s dark humor is so sparse that one might laugh at a given moment and immediately afterward feel a stab of guilt. The film does not contain sentimentality but rather works to expose pity in its raw form. Pity was described as a tragicomedy in which the authorial voice walks the fine line of discomfort, providing no emotional release. Each of the domestic scenes contributed to the performance of sadness: the furniture, the family routine, and even the morning coffee.
Yet, some critics felt emotionally distant from the film. The sparseness of sentiment made the film appear emotionally detached, particularly in the film’s closing segments, where Giannis crosses some unforeseen moral boundaries. That emotional distance, however, was intentional. The emotional coldness is evident ode to the central character’s myriad defenses, built from deep-rooted trauma. The distance is primarily calculated to mark the divergent, and dramatic, effect of the character’s bleak existence on and within the complex social world.
For some, Pity is about modern loneliness, where social sorrow, and even sadness, is socially acceptable currency.
Having Sadness Become an Identity
Pity addresses the emotional dependency of self-performed sadness rather than a loss. Performing one’s personal sorrow is the focus of the film. We disingenuously crave the attention of spectators on a loss, rather than a form of personal identity. “People do not focus on a positive aspect of one’s life and offer an acknowledgment of that. Instead, they dismiss the person, and become apathetic. Instead, they focus on one aspect and offer their attention on a loss,” is the central premise of the film. It is a profound rationalization to construct a theme and a hypothetical central character around. The premise is heartbreaking.
This theme resonates beyond the boundaries of Greek civilization. In the Indian context, there is also an implicit admiration for the person who suffers. In Indian families, and traditional families in particular, ‘suffering’ is seen as a moral virtue. In the film, the idea of someone subconsciously sustaining grief as a form of an identity is extreme, but it is not far removed from the emotional reality.
The film title alone serves to highlight the dangers of unrestrained pity. In this story, healing is not a new form of salvation. It is, rather, exile. The tragic loss for the protagonist is not the loss of either his wife or his sanity, but the loss of his audience.
The Storm Behind the Stillness
For a film that manifests such high levels of control, the making of Pity was anything but seamless. The writing took two full years, as Makridis and Filippou reworked the same scenes in a frenzied attempt to balance absurdity with empathy. Each scene was meant to feel both terrifying and comedic — a task that borders near impossibility.
Casting added a new layer of risk. Makridis had an idea of someone who possessed the ability to hold and command an audience, someone with a blank charisma, an ability to bring forth pity without shedding a single tear. After several rounds of testing, he was able to recruit Drakopoulos, a person with imaginative theatrical experience.
The production design choices also proved to be profound in meaning. Selecting bright and clean apartments and sunny seaside locations served to contrast the protagonist’s discontent. The more beautiful a character’s emotional state is described, the more visually and emotionally jarring his surroundings become.
This puzzlement extended to the first test screenings, where some audience members interpreted the film as a satire while others described it as bleak. But ambiguity is a central emotional characteristic of the film, and Makridis’s refusal to clarify this is consistent with his artistic vision. Darkness is unconquered.
Audience reception of Pity was split, but it garnered the respect of critics, especially in Makridis’s home country of Greece, where he won a number of national film awards. The emotional discomfort was important to his new role as one of the boldest contemporary cinema voices in Europe.
Pity is a film about dislocation, irrelevance, and the suffering depth. It’s about the paradox of performative compassion. It’s about how the need to be seen and the wanting sadness can easily coexist. It’s about the most painful deficit of all.
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