An atmosphere of violence and paranoia pervades Peter Fleischmann’s 1975 thriller Weak Spot from its opening shot, in which a nameless man commits suicide by jumping from a balcony rather than going with the military secret police. The nature of his suspected crime is never revealed, and when, just a few minutes later, Georgis (Ugo Tognazzi) is arrested on suspicion of conspiring with a political subversive merely because of his reaction when the man stepped on his foot, it’s clear that truth and justice are malleable in the hands of these secret police.
Weak Spot is set during a seven-year period in Greece that began with its right-wing military junta putting a group of power-hungry colonels in charge of the country. And while it’s focused on the sense of fear, disorientation, and mistrust that accompanied this period of scaremongering and rampant torture of innocents, the film is too strange and determined to defy both audience and genre expectations to be contained by the term “political thriller.”
Weak Spot’s critique of authoritarianism is both pointed and discursive—clear-eyed in its condemnation of the rampant, randomized brutality of the era yet purposefully opaque in its depiction of the political system’s internal logic. Indeed, the unknowability and sheer unpredictability of the operations of the secret police is what makes the group so terrifying in the film. Their attempts to create order out of disorder, confusion, and double-crossing ultimately leaves even their own loyal agents as open targets to their impenetrable whims.
Much of the film plays out as a tragicomic, Kafkaesque journey in which two men, unnamed in the film and credited only as The Investigator (Michel Piccoli) and The Manager (Mario Adorf), are assigned to escort Georgis to Athens, where he’ll be interrogated. However, as a series of misfortunes prevent them from getting there, Fleischmann’s film morphs into something far more ambiguous, both morally and narratively, as it examines the nature of truth, power, fate, and masculinity under a regime whose leaders are determined to quash what it sees as that human weaknesses, like empathy and mercy, that would undermine their absolute authority.
Throughout Weak Spot, the filmmakers integrate aspects of the buddy and odd-couple comedy. At times, The Investigator’s weaknesses are exploited by the belligerent, testosterone-fueled Manager, while at other times, The Investigator finds himself working with Georgis to figure out what exactly the powers that be that are manipulating him actually want. Through it all, irony and dark comedy dance hand in hand with impending dread. This all lends the film a queasy paranoia befitting characters who, enemies of the state or not, are helpless to fight against the demands of a system with no limits to its power when it comes to subjugating its citizens.
Image/Sound
Radiance’s transfer, sourced from a 4K scan of the film’s original negative, is rich in detail, as exemplified in everything from the grim, minimalist buildings in which the secret police operate to the glimpses of the beauty in the Greek countryside and seaside locales. The film leans toward monochrome grays and blues, and the color balancing reflects this, while still presenting naturalistic skin tones and vibrant splashes of color in the blue skies and green trees that infrequently pop up. The uncompressed mono audio nicely handles the ebbs and flows of Ennio Morricone’s idiosyncratic score without allowing it to drown out the dialogue or sound effects.
Extras
Critic Travis Woods’s new audio commentary is fascinating. His passion for Weak Spot is evident in his detailed analysis of its complex themes and sly symbolism, which he connects to the sociopolitical realities in Greece when the junta was in power, and which informed Antonis Samarakis’s 1965 novel. His general knowledge of 1970s Euro-thrillers also comes through in his observations about the film’s actors and their work throughout the decade. The disc also includes a discussion of Morricone’s score with soundtrack expert Lovely Jon and an archival TV interview with Michel Piccoli. Rounding out the package is a booklet with an essay by writer Kat Ellinger, who breaks down the film’s knotty representations of masculinity.
Overall
Radiance has once again rescued a fantastic, underseen European thriller from obscurity, presenting it with an excellent transfer and a small but compelling and enriching slate of extras.
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