Slamdance Review: Brando With a Glass Eye: The Madness That Lies Behind “The Method”

Movie info via Slamdance:

Athens, Greece. Luca resorts to armed robbery to fund his dream of studying Method Acting in New York. In a heist gone wrong, he accidentally critically injures Ilias, an innocent bystander. While visiting Ilias in the hospital trauma ward, Luca forms an unlikely friendship, but he keeps his crime a secret.

Review:

Brando With a Glass Eye, a film about an actor who finds himself becoming unable to separate performance from real life is a sly critique of THE METHOD” theory of acting.

The movie is held together by the mesmerizing performance of the Greek actor Yiannis Niarros as Luca. Luca spends his days practicing his craft on the real world, watching Stella Adler lessons and hoping to get a coveted New York City internship. When he and his brother, Alekos (Kostas Nikouli), who has dreams of opening a wine bar, decide to rob a local sex performance establishment to fund their dreams, a weird friendship develops between the passerby, Ilias (Alexandro Chrystsanthopoulos) shot accidentally in the attempt and Luca.

The two are like an upscale version of Ratso Rizzo and Joe Buck from Midnight Cowboy. Ilias, a rich guy, has a latent death wish and Luca gets an event worthy of his method skills. Luca is creating the movie he so desperately wants to star in. The two actors pull the movie back to reality whenever it strays to genre homage of noir, mysteries and neorealist dramas, some Felini moments and the frequent need to create classic movie dialogue. It can be fun to guess the film references and other director style homages that pop up. It also, towards the end, can get annoying and tedious. Glass Eye can take another twenty minutes of prudent editing. Antonis Tsonis, in his debut, has delivered the typical uneven but promising and talented first effort.

Brando With a Glass Eye gets a 3.0/5 or a B,

It’s streaming as part of Slamdance 2024 which is part of the Slamdance Channel. The virtual part of the festival runs from January 22-28.

Credits;

Produced by

Wayne Blair…executive producerLeda Bouzoukou…line producerMaria Drandaki…executive producerPanagiotis Fafoutis…executive producerBlake Northfield…producerTia Spanos Tsonis…producer

Music by

Alexandros Livitsanos

Cinematography by

Jörg Gruber

Editing by

Peter Carrodus

Year:
2024
Runtime:
122 minutes
Language:
Greek
Country:
Greece, Australia
Premiere:
World Premiere
Genre:
Drama
Subtitle Language:
English
Social Media:
Director:
Antonis Tsonis
Screenwriter:
Antonis Tsonis
Producer:
Tia Spanos Tsonis, Blake Northfield
Cast:
Yiannis Niarros, Kostas Nikoulis, Xenia Dania, Alexandros Chrysanthopoulos, Maria Kallimani, Yiannis Tsortekis, Chara Mata Giannatou