Classiq - An online journal that celebrates cinema, culture, style and storytelling.

21 August 2025

Read instead…in print #36. North by Northwest: The Man Who Had Too Much

If we ever needed a reassurance about why we love cinema in general and Alfred Hitchcock in particular, then Hitchcock’s North by Northwest: The Man Who Had Too Much, by James Stratton, spells that out. North by Northwest “sparkles with a technical confidence and a joy in making movies,” it introduces us to “characters who are neither completely good nor completely evil” and, of course, to “the male predecessor of Melanie Daniels”, Roger Thornhill, the first film character I referred to by name and not by the actor who played it. And it “may be thoroughly unrealistic and illogical” – it’s cinema, after all, and we love being fascinated by it – “but the world view has realistic resonance to it; North by Northwest is a wild jazz symphony, extravagant in both its tone and range.”

Read instead… in print is about a good book about cinema or filmmakers. No discursive, pretentious analyses, no verbose scrutiny. Because the idea is to invite you to read the book, not read about it here. But instead of using social media, I use my journal. Back to basics. Take it as a wish to break free of over-reliance on social media (even if it’s just for posting a photo of a good book) for presenting my work, cultural finds and interests. These are things to be enjoyed as stand-alone pieces in a more substantial and meaningful way than showing them in the black hole of Instagram thronged with an audience with a short attention span. This is also a look through my voluminous collection of books about film that I use as research in my adamant decision to rely less and less on the online and more on more on print materials.

August Newsletter: Make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry, make ‘em wait, and Silkwood

Photos: Classiq Journal

“The authors of genuine children’s literature, then,
are only rarely and indirectly educators…
Jules Verne is perhaps the only one.
They are poets whose imagination is privileged
to remain on the dream wavelength of childhood.”

André Bazin, What Is Cinema?

Viewing

Silkwood, 1983
Mike Nichols

This is easily my favourite Mike Nichols film and my favourite Meryl Streep role. This is great visual storytelling. These are not movie stars, they are characters in the story. Kurt Russell and Cher proving themselves as actors, and Meryl Streep becoming Karen Silkwood. I was mesmerised by her, and only after I watched the film I found out that the film was based on a real life story and character, a lab technician at a nuclear plant who takes action when she starts to doubt the safety of the working conditions. A story about “a woman, her actions, her conscious, her goals, her fears.” What Meryl Streep does with her character simply made me wish I came out of every film feeling that what I saw on the screen was someone’s story, that I was part of something for 1 1/2 or 2 hours.

In the book Mike Nichols: A Life, the director recalled the moment when he saw Meryl come out from costume fitting (the great Ann Roth was the costume designer): “She came out in a very short denim skirt and cowboy boots and a tight T-shirt with her cigarettes rolled into one sleeve. And my heart started pounding. I had a kind of anxiety attack because she was so tough. She was already somebody else. She wasn’t testing the costume. She was just there, in character. It was the most startling moment.”

Nichols also recalled Streep’s infectious joy at getting to do the role. She chopped her hair short, without telling Nichols, and dyed it dark brown too, to match Silkwood’s. “In Streep, Nichols realised he had found a kindred spirit,” Mark Harris writes, “someone who liked to act the way he liked to direct, working out each moment, imagining what her character would do physically, how she would sound, move, think. Streep forged a relationship with everyone she worked with, whether costar or cast member.” “She just somehow moved her soul around,”, Nichols noted. “All the relationships in the movie were people’s relationships to her.”

Summer at Grandpa’s, 1984
Hou Hsiao-Hsien

The first Hou Hsiao-Hsien film that I saw was Taipei Story. A silhouette in white seen from behind. Wide-legged white trousers and a white shoulder-padded blazer. Low, white kitten heels clattering on the tiles of an empty apartment overlooking a similar tall building of flats. From behind oversized sunglasses, she sizes up the apartment and begins to list the electronic appliances that could fit in a corner of a room, all the ambitions and comforts of modern life, a life she seems to have been long settling in. She is not alone. He is casually dressed and, as he is mimicking a baseball player with his swinging arms, does not seem to share her enthusiasm and ideas of a dream-life. That’s the opening scene from Taipei Story, a film that captures a city and a couple with contradicting world views, a city and a couple caught between past and future, between tradition and modernity, between troubled historical identity and Western newness. A broken city, a broken relationship. I wrote an article about it, Power dressing and Sunglasses after Dark in Taipei Story, a few years back.

Summer at Grandpa’s is so different. It’s about childhood (a young boy and his younger sister are sent to their grandparents to spend the summer when their mother is hospitalised), it’s about a different kind of life, simpler, and I want to say happier. But happier here doesn’t mean that it isn’t without hardship, or sadness, or problems, or tragic moments. Happier is as in having freedom as a child: roaming the countryside with your friends, getting into trouble and getting out of trouble by yourself, and learning valuable lessons from it, reading in the afternoon with the windows open until you doze off, being around the older, wiser people representing a smooth transition into growing up, making friends during the course of an afternoon but who will forever change your life. There is such a quiet beauty and profound wisdom in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s seemingly unspectacular images of everyday life.

Singin’ in the Rain, 1952
Gene Kelly

When I first watched Singin’ in the Rain, I couldn’t stop marvelling at the all-singing, all-dancing Kelly, and at how the musical numbers were so seamlessly integrated into the plot, and such a good story it was, too. Absolute joy! Absolute genius! Now I have rewatched it with my son and we still marveled, our eyes glued to the screen, at how an actor, singer, director, dance choreographer, could also be so masculine and an athlete of that caliber.

For Your Eyes Only, 1981
John Glen

It’s the gritty realism of the Timothy Dalton and Daniel Craig films that I love the most in all of the Bond movies. Then there is Sean Connery’s From Russia with Love. There is also In Her Majesty’s Secret Service that has something special about it. And, finally, there is Roger Moore’s For Your Eyes Only, which I consider one of the best in the series, and reviewing it again recently on a projector in the garden, made me enjoy more than ever before the great actions scenes and amazing locations, Corfu, Meteora, Cortina d’Ampezzo. Coming after Moonraker, that had put James Bond on the orbit and into the space age (bigger and more spectacular was the aim), For Your Eyes Only was shaped as a more serious and realistic spy thriller anchored on a young woman, Melina Havelock (Carole Bouquet), whose parents are killed by an assassin. There is also Bond’s personal story that we are reminded of at the very beginning of the film when Bond goes to the grave of his wife – that was a first in the history of the Bond films. But what makes For Your Eyes Only stand out even more though is that there is also the tough side of Roger Moore’s Bond that is being explored more than in the other films he appeared in. The director, John Glen, wanted to tap deep into the character, not just by showing his humane side (Glen had the idea with the grave scene), but also by revealing a hard edge that was characteristic more of Sean Connery’s Bond. Glen knew that they had to steer away from the much too gimmicky and fantastical scripts and to tone down the humour in the other Roger Moore Bond films. It worked beautifully and it is an important part in the evolution of Bond on film. Now I am looking forward to seeing where Denis Villeneuve will take next movie in the franchise.

Reading

Braided elegance that blossoms beautifully in idyllic remoteness, pottery work as an integral part of living, friends and indigo plants growing together the whole year round, an independent movement in the distinguished Japanese calligraphy: Craftland Japan is a voyage through Japan’s remote artisan ateliers, core values and centuries-old craftsmanship traditions, a great journey into the world of makers and artists and their creative minds and skills. “Things made by hand have a feeling of one’s heart because the hands and heart are directly connected. I want to show my children the way I work. There are many choices for everyone in how to live and how to earn money, but I want to teach them to try things. It’s easy to enter a company and have a salary. But to make money with your skills in making things you like is not easy, to be independent is not easy. I want to show them different options to life.” – Kazuto Yoshikawa, woodworking artist

Françoise Sagan’s Un profil perdu (Scars on the Soul – unfortunately it is out of print and I haven’t found any good edition to link to) is part essay, part novel. I prefer her as an essayist: it’s where you continuously remark her cool intelligence, her forward thinking, her freedom of the thought and clarity of mind.

Jacques Cousteau’s The Silent World. A reminder that every great explorer’s greatest achievement is not how far he or she has gone, but the ability to remain humble in front of nature.

Listening

The soundtrack: Singin’ in the Rain

The concert: Stereophonics, Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone, Rome, August 29th

The album: Make ‘em Laugh, Make ‘em Cry, Make ‘em Wait – Stereophonics

Making

Joyas, by Anna Westerlund, my favourite ceramics and jewellery designer. With every new item, Anna Westerlund seems to rise above her craft. There is hand and heart into what she makes, something new I haven’t yet seen, and a timeless concept behind her work than is endlessly inspiring.

Exploring

There are some places you enter and that instantly speak to you. You feel that everything is at it should be, and that it satisfies your sense of curiosity and beauty and discovery, all under the same roof. Paraphernalia, in Athens, is one such special place under the Mediterranean sun. A wonderful miscellaneous collection of products, from art and design books (it’s where I found the book Craftland Japan), local art, Japanese stationery, magazines, accessories, cosmetics and homeware, and, most importantly, knowledgeable, kind and well-cultured staff.

On an end note

Dominic Lees talks to Natasha Lyonne about the limitations of AI in filmmaking and the related risks. It was disturbing to find out about the AI-generated spoof videos of Wes Anderson’s film style, to which Natasha responded: “What a perfect filmmaker! To recreate his images – it’s so, so disturbing… Wes has to live a whole life to become the quality of human being that he is, who sees the world in such a specific way. This really robs from him, and to make from him something sort of comedic on your computer in like ten seconds is deeply disturbing. It’s pretty obvious that it should not be legal. And certainly should not be legal without him getting a very serious payday.”

“Wes has to live a whole life to become the quality of human being that he is, who sees the world in such a specific way.” We are way past the limits that should have been drawn long ago. Where to now?

The regulars: The interviews, newsletters and podcasts I turn to every week and/or every month because they are that good. Ruthie’s Table 4 with Ruth Rogers. Fashion Neurosis, with Bella Freud. Craig Mod’s newsletters: Roden and Ridgeline. Soundtracking, with Edith Bowman. Alicia Kennedy’s newsletter. Racquet’s Rennae Stubbs tennis podcast. Gone to Timbuktu with Sophy Roberts. Sirene Journal, Racquet, and Waves & Woods in print.

”If the actors are good enough,
something really begins to happen: Life occurs.
Meryl woke me up. This time, I feel – knock on wood –
I’ll remain awake.”

Mike Nichols, Mike Nichols: A Life

Posted by classiq in Books, Culture, Film, Newsletter | | Comments Off

5 August 2025

“He photographed what he saw in his mind’s eye”: David Lean, Venice, and Summertime

Photo: Katharine Hepburn and Gaetano Autiero in “Summertime”, 1955, directed by David Lean. United Artists

Has anyone captured Venice at first sight better in film, so vivid, so alive, so real, so anew, than David Lean in Summertime? Venice plays itself. You are not set in the middle of the story, or of the city. You journey into it, along with Katharine Hepburn’s character, Jane Hudson. It takes a while, for example, to arrive at Piazza San Marco. I like how David Lean lets Jane postpone going there, and linger on the terrace of her hotel, slowly starting to take Venice in, as if it’s suddenly too much to handle.

Other famous Venetian locations, you don’t even get to see. You wait, you anticipate, you slowly discover this beautiful place with the wide-eyed amazement of seeing it for the first time, through Jane’s curiosity and intoxicating excitement that never wavers and through the rich details that David Lean uses to tell the story: an extremely narrow street that seems to shrink even more under the shoutings in Italian of the families in the storied buildings that seem to close down on Jane as she walks by, the elongated shadows cast into back alleys, the funny little boy in his red and white striped t-shirt, short trousers and bare feet playing the guide, the friend, the local better than anyone else, the charming, elegant Pensione Fiorini instead of a waterfront palazzo, the stripes that subtly dress the city (from umbrellas, to women’s skirts, to canal poles, to chairs), the dimly lit labyrinthian streets at night, a decaying golden stone wall bathed in the afternoon sun, the bustling noise of the smartly clad crowds in the piazza in the evening, and the magnificent stillness of the same Piazza San Marco at dawn, the perfectly captured Italian characters: “In Italy, you sit down to eat and you eat a meal! In Paris, what do you sit down to eat? A sauce! In America, he sits down to eat, and what does he eat? Pills!” The true love affair is David Lean’s with Venice.

Photo: “Summertime”, 1955. United Artists

In her book, Me: Stories of My Life, Katharine Hepburn, who plays an American who is taking the trip of her life to Venice, where she will find love only to leave again, writes: “David was always very fussy about a script and removed everything that didn’t interest him – so this film is really David in Venice. Not necessarily knowing a great amount about the famous treasures, but a person reacting to the beauties and atmosphere of this remarkable city on a two-week holiday and a love affair, and then leaving on the train.”

Photo: Katharine Hepburn and Gaetano Autiero in “Summertime”, 1955. United Artists

“It was told with great simplicity in the streets, in the Piazza San Marco. We would shoot in the tiny streets – only a few feet wide. The sun would come and go in a matter of minutes. It was a very emotional part, and I tell you I had to be on my toes to give David enough of what he wanted practically on call. But it was thrilling. And the music he picked was perfect.

It was fascinating to work for David. He was very basic – he was simple – he was true. He told a story. It’s a slice of life you understand. In all its detail. He photographed what he saw in his mind’s eye. It was a most extraordinary gift. He seemed to me to simply absorb Venice. It was his. He had a real photographic gift. He thought in a descriptive way. His shots tell the story. He was capable of a sort of super concentration. It made a very deep and definite impression on me, and he was one of the most interesting directors I ever worked with. He had to get exactly the performance he wanted out of each actor so that it would fit in with what he had in his mind’s eye. Thus his pictures are all of a piece. He pairs a picture and it is his.”

Everyone has their own version of a place. And David Lean breathes life into every corner of Venice that he films. I have seen pictures of Renato’s shop in the film. I understand it still stands today, although it’s not an antique shop anymore, but there is nothing special about it, it’s uninviting and sad-looking. Any place comes alive when you live it, when you have your own story to attach to, or, as in David Lean’s case, when you have that extraordinary photographic and visual gift to make us viewers experience a city through his eyes, to make us see what he saw.

Photo: Katharine Hepburn and Gaetano Autiero in “Summertime”, 1955. United Artists

“I’m the independent type, always have been,” Jane says at some point at the beginning of the story, comfortably tucked behind an emotional barricade. It is, in fact, one of Katharine Hepburn’s most wonderful, vulnerable, self-revealing and transformative roles. And yet, it’s good to see a glimpse of the real Katharine on the movie’s set (second picture below): she is still in the shirt that’s part of one of her film costumes, but instead of the skirt she wears in the movie, she has her favourite piece of clothing on, the trousers, a quintessential part of the image of one of Hollywood’s truly original stars, the most reluctant and most natural there ever was. This is not one of the films where Hepburn seemed to be playing herself (and, if so, why not?), such as The Philadelphia Story (a sight to behold), Bringing Up Baby or Woman of the Year (where she wears a tuxedo and her own personality), and we are happy for it, because we love her for the great actor that she was, too.

Photo: Katharine Hepburn, Gaetano Autiero and director David Lean on the set of “Summertime”, Venice, 1954.

Letter to my friends to learn how to make films together, by Jean-Luc Godard

Photo: Jean Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina in “Pierrot le Fou”, 1965, directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Société Nouvelle de Cinématographie (SNC)

“I play
You play
We play
At cinema
You think there are
Rules for the game
Because you are a child
Who does not yet know
What is a game and what is
Reserved for grownups
Which you already are
Because you have forgotten
That it is a child’s game
What does it consist of
There are many definitions
Here are two or three
Looking at oneself
In the mirror of other people
Forgetting and learning
Quickly and slowly
The world
And oneself
Thinking and speaking
Odd game
That life”

– Letter to my friends to learn how to make films together, Jean-Luc Godard (from the book Godard on Godard)

“ ‘The third time this week.’ Of course I did. They’re showing Johnny Guitar. Good for her education,” Pierrot (Jean Paul Belmondo) tells his wife after she reproaches him for allowing their daughter to go to the cinema for the third time in a week. There are many allusions to the movies in Pierrot le Fou, from Belmondo imitating Michel Simon, from mentions of Pépé le Moko, and Laurel and Hardy, to Pierrot’s describing Marianne (Anna Karina) as “a woman like a Hollywood movie star in Technicolor”, and the appearance of Samuel Fuller as himself in a scene where Pierrot says he’s always wanted to know what cinema is. Fuller replies (in English and another translates into French): “A film is like a battle ground, love, hate, action, violence, death, in one word… emotions.” Godard confessed that he had wanted to say it for a long time, but it was Fuller who found the word ‘emotion’.

A Lolita-style novel was the starting point for Pierrot le Fou, Godard having bought the rights a couple of years prior, a film that was completely spontaneous, with the whole last part invented on the spot. “I thought about You Only Live Once; and instead of Lolita or La Chienne kind of couple, I wanted to tell the story of the last romantic couple, the last descendants of La Nouvelle Héloïse, Werther and Hermann and Dorothea,” the director revealed in an interview with Cahiers du Cinéma. An homage to all those classic movies, and yet a reinvention of filmmaking, a chance to improvise, a search for a vaster cinema, a response of sorts to the days when cinema was something new. A film in the spirit of adventure, a film of great freedom, because you really don’t know when it will end before it does, a film conceived from its author’s own world of cinema.

“Two or three years ago I felt that everything had been done,
that there was nothing left to do today.
I couldn’t see anything to do that hadn’t been done already.[…]
After Pierrot, I no longer feel this. Yes. One must film,
talk about, everything. Everything remains to be done.”

Photos: “Pierrot le Fou”, 1965. Société Nouvelle de Cinématographie (SNC)

July newsletter: Leigh Fermor’s Mani, Jules Dassin’s Athens, and Moondance

“All at once a further wonder came
to increase our well-being: a cool breath of wind.
This is one of the seldom-failing blessings
of midsummer in the Peloponnese.”

Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese

Viewing

Never on Sunday
Jules Dassin

Never on Sunday is Jules Dassin’s love letter to Greece. Homer Thrace (Jules Dassin himself) is an American scholar and self-confessed amateur philosopher who comes to the port of Piraeus to find out the truth: Why Greece, the cradle of civilisation and culture, has given in to a life of pleasure. From that very premise, finding out the truth, he sets about improving Ilya (Melina Mercouri), a beautiful, graceful and intelligent, life-loving prostitute he is fond of, to him the personification of Greece herself. The truth is a little different than his perception of life, and than the American way of thinking and seeing the world.

Moralising and redeeming messages are often the weakness of so many good American films. And the fact that Jules Dassin made Rififi in France, having been blacklisted in Hollywood because of his pre-war communist affiliations, is part of what makes Rififi the best noir. As David Cairns wrote in his essay, I’m a Crook at Heart, Rififi confirmed “that outside Hollywood and the constraints of the Production Code, it was unnecessary to prettify the ugly stories with socially redeeming messages and moralising”.

After making Rififi (1955) in France and winning best director at Cannes, Dassin took up residence and filmmaking in Greece. He shot Never on Sunday in Piraeus, in 1960, and just as he had done with Rififi, The Naked City and Night and the City, he revealed the seaport of Piraeus not only to the Greeks, but to the whole world. The whole atmosphere is authentically Greek, the music is traditional bouzouki music and the crew and cast are almost entirely Greek.

But it is Melina Mercouri that is the best part of the film. With her raspy voice, daring look in the eye, disarming candour and galloping naturalness, she has a magnetic presence. Every man in Piraeus adores Ilya, but she is the one who chooses her partners. She is independent, lives in her own apartment, not sharing accommodation like the other women in her profession, who have to pay an exorbitant rent for it. Forty at the time, Mercouri radiates the kind of beauty and wisdom that only come with maturity and “her charisma and likability elevate her beyond the archetypal figure of the whore with a heart of gold,” as Peter Shelley states in the book Jules Dassin: The Life and Films. The author further reports how Mercouri researched the part of Ilya in Notaras Street, the red-light district of Piraeus: “The girls received us graciously and in the most bourgeois manner. There was tea, little cakes, and polite conversation. They liked me. [In the film] I became the mascot of the whores of the world. I received letters from everywhere thanking me for portraying their profession with dignity.” She is wonderful in the role and one of the finest scenes is when Ilya, alone in the room, sings the theme song of the film, her acting talent and Dassin’s directing sensibility and skill beautifully coming together.

Unrelated, 2007
Joanna Hogg

There are many films that I associate with summer, but Joanna Hogg’s debut feature Unrelated is a truly special one. An extended English family are joined by a friend at their rented house in Italy for a summer holiday. People sunbathe, have casual meals on the steps of a piazzeta, swim at night, drive around in the Tuscan countryside. You can feel the unhurried pace of summer, the time when people want to escape their daily lives, when they want to believe that anything is allowed, when they wish they can make up for lost opportunities, when they only think about their day, when they want to just be. Eventually however, they all realise, each in his or her own way, that life doesn’t take a detour during summer, although we all might be lead to think that at one point or another. It’s a film that bottles up the beauty, the reality and the bittersweetness of summer in a way few others ever have. I loved how the camera focused on Anna (Kathryn Worth) in many scenes, while the other characters carried on in the background and we only get to hear their voices for a while – such a subtle and effective glimpse into the emotional state of the character without any verbose explanation.

Jurassic Park, 1993
Steven Spielberg

It remains my ten-year-old son’s favourite film. So we watch it every summer. Naturally, we had to go to see the latest Jurassic World Rebirth and, transporter by Alexandre Desplat’s extraordinary score, it once again made us realise what gem of a classic the original film is and return to it once more.

Do the Right Thing, 1989
Spike Lee

“Today’s temperature’s gonna rise up over 100 degrees, so there’s a Jheri curl alert! That’s right, Jheri curl alert. If you have a Jheri curl, stay in the house or you’ll end up with a permanent black helmet on your head fuh-eva!” These lines belong to Mister Señor Love Daddy (Samuel L. Jackson) in Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee’s incendiary film shot in bright colours and set on the hottest day of the summer in Brooklyn, NYC, and to the assaulting beats of hip-hop, when hip-hop had something to say. As the day gets hotter, simmering racial tensions erupt in this fiercely independent and unapologetic film that remains more relevant than the ones made today.

Reading

Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese. A travel writing all his own, mysterious and observant, tender and experienced, a fascinating journey of a true traveller who goes deep into the history, culture and wilderness of the Mani, at the heart of Europe’s southernmost promontory. And you feel you get to start to know its people, just as they are.

Listening

The radio (on a road trip from Athens to the Peloponnese): Radio Zeppelin 106.7

The soundtrack: The “Birdman” score performed live by composer Antonio Sanchez as the audience is watching the film. Les Nuits de Fourvière, Lyon, France, 20th of July, 2025.

The album: Van Morison, Moondance

Making

In the exploding heat of Athens in summertime (even in June, it has become tricky), nothing cools you off better than an iced herbal tea you are offered by the most thoughtful staff when you enter the Naxos Apothecary. An oasis of calmness that has the most wonderful hand creams and teas to buy, as well as simply yet exquisitely packaged face and body products that are named after Naxian villages, the root of the brand. Candles and summery scented lip balms (yoghurt, mulberry, grapes, wild rose) make for the perfect treat to bring back home or gift to family and friends.

Exploring

The Mani peninsula. The expanding sky, the strident noise of cicadas coming out of the olive trees all day long from daybreak to sundown, snaking through the hills to the most perfect beach behind a forest of reeds which I am intentionally keeping to myself, green transparent water with caiques in sight, winding hillside roads lined with oleanders, unruffled cliffs, the quaint beauty of the village of Kardamyli, the Amalfi Coast vibe of Limeni, with its stone houses perched on the edge of the coast, a drive at golden hour on the coastline with the sea rarely out of sight, the scarce tourists, the hospitality of the locals – “Many things in Greece have remained unchanged since the time of the Odyssey and perhaps the most striking of these is the hospitality shown to strangers; the more remote and mountainous the region, the less this has altered.” (Patrick Leigh Fermor) – and their effortless ability to turn meals into feasts, the food at Elies under the olive trees, the daily sight of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s house and imagining all the stories that went on in there, fictional and real. Far from the madding crowds of the islands, the sense of place is strong and immediate. It’s summer freedom. It’s like a beloved familiar and remote place you return to year after year, harking back to a time when life felt simpler. Because nothing felt more rewarding in the midday glare of the summer sun than returning to an exquisite, little family-run hotel that offered all the intimacy, comfort and tranquility of a family summer house. Hosts become friends and when you leave they surprise you one more time, with farewell hand-crafted and hand-grown gifts, an act of kindness that I am sure goes back to memorial times, but also a token of a memorable holiday.

On an end note

Trust the locals. It’s where you get the best recommendations for the lesser known spots, which are usually the most beautiful ones, too. Nothing beats the advice you get when you invest your interest in an honest and heartfelt conversation with the locals. It can be the owner or concierge of your hotel, the waiter at the restaurant, the artist in the seaside village, the cherries vendor on the side of the road, or the shop assistant of an artifacts store in Athens where you get to exchange impressions about Paul Thomas Anderson and Yorgos Lanthimos (for more talk about the Greek filmmaker, you can check out my interview with the director’s close collaborator Vasilis Marmatakis). Rounding-up this newsletter on the subject of cinema, I will add that catching a film at one of Athens’ many open-air cinemas is the best way I could ever think of for ending a summer day, heat wave permitting.

“The late afternoon sun softened everything and,
combined with the relief of escape from the
confinement of the mountains, it charged the air
with a feeling of well-being and holiday.”

Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese

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