Stella

Melina Mercouri’s dynamic performance in “Stella” made her the first internationally renowned Greek film star. The film itself launched the career of Michael Cacoyannis as a director and also led to attention being drawn to the fledgling Greek post-World War II cinema. Mercouri is an Athens night club singer who refuses to behave by the harsh conventional moral standards of Greek society. She has a student lover (Alekos Alexandrakis) and is happy to spend her life singing, falling in love and breaking men’s hearts. She begins an affair with a local football champion, Mitsos (George Foundas), but finds that he refuses to grant her the freedom she has worked so hard to gain. When she decides to leave Mitsos, she finds that her transgression of feminine propriety leads to danger and violence. This beautifully photographed melodrama is a unique representation of both independent female desire and of defiance of misogynist tradition (themes that would resurface in Cacoyannis’ most famous film, “Zorba the Greek”). For a contemporary audience “Stella” is illuminating for its locations amongst the war-torn working-class locales of Piraeus, as well as for its atypical feminist heroine. The original music score by Manos Hadjidakis, combining rembetika and demotic music, is justifiably one of his most famous works. But it is Mercouri who is the unforgettable centre of this stark and powerful film. For the rest of her life, she would be living in Stella’s shadow. In Greek with English subtitles.