Simon de la Columna

Greek director Telémachos Alexiou continues his elegant and playful reworking of cinematic mythologies with his film “Simón de la Columna”. Loosely based on Luis Bunuels “Simón del Desierto” (1965), a fragmentary fable on the priest Simón who has lived for 6 years, 6 weeks and 6 days on the the top of a pillar in the desert, praying for the purification of his soul. His quest for total asceticism is challenged by the seductive promise of earthly pleasures embodied by several amusing characters: a smart priest, a dwarf and his mother, but especially a young beautiful girl who visits him three times in different masquerades persistently prove the (sexual) resolution of poor Simón. 
In fidelity to Bunuels joyous blasphemy Telémachos Alexious carves out and hyperbolizes the queer aspects of the original: “The Devil is a Woman” was the title of one the Josef von Sternberg/Marlene Dietrich collaborations – and this is literally true for the metamorphic and polymorph perverse woman of “Simòn de la Columna”. In the character of the devil-woman (played with transgressive pleasure by Athena Mathiou) Telémachos Alexiou pays homage to the great androgynous divas of cinema: Dietrich, but above all Maria Callas in Pasolini’s adaption in “Medea” which we see in inserted footage alongside another great heroines of cinema history: Maria Falconetti in Dreyer’s “Jeanne d’Arc”, Rita Hayworth in Welles’ “The Lady from Shanghai”, Anna Karina in Godard’s “Vivre sa vie”. 
In the heretic tradition of Bunuel and Pasolini “Simón de la Columna” stages a queer battle of the sexes between the devil-woman and the ridiculously uptight saint (played by Ulrich Ziemons). Poor Simón is a prophet without a people, an autistic monad in the desert, plagued by kinky fantasies after meeting the devil. 
To find a poetic expression for this comic dilemma of male narcissism, the film consistently works with two basic formal parameters: First of all, a mimicry of silent film, where the dialogues are only written as subtitles and secondly, a rigorous pattern of shot/reverse shot montage with no spatial overlaps. It is a nearly Bressonian construction of cinematic space build only through eye-line-matches – Simón’s pillar seems to be located in a entirely different (spritual) place, even though he acts in the diegetic space of the fiction. 
It all ends with a surprising and intelligent meta-cinematic twist, where the cinema screen transforms itself to the projection screen of a queer female heresy: The powers of cinema are the powers of women.