Movie: Never on Sunday - Pote tin Kyriaki (Jules Dassin, 1960)
Homer (Jules Dassin) walks into a Greek bar...and is utterly out of place. The boisterous locals sing, shout, drink and smash their glasses, while he skittishly scribbles in his little notebook. And when he orders a coffee, the waiter admonishes him; "real men drink ouzo." Real men also dance after drinking ouzo, to Homer's enthusiastic applause, a gesture the dancing drunk doesn't appreciate. His 'pertformance' isn't intended for an audience, he does it for his own delight, not because he seeks to satisfy the needs of a strange man "like some sort of circus animal." It's a clever little bit of screenwriting - Never on Sunday is about Homer's futile attempts to re-educate Ilya (Melina Mercouri), the most popular prostitute in Piraeus, into a better life. The film makes clear in many different ways that Homer's efforts are wrongheaded, highlighting that Ilya doesn't want or need to be saved,. It stops just short of explictly presenting prostitution as a potential form of feminist self-expression, but it doesn't take the most attentive viewer to see what the angry dancing drunk is a metaphor for.
Never on Sunday is a less succesfull Pygmalion-inspired story than Educating Rita or My Fair Lady. Both of those movies end up complicating their basic premise, questioning the idea that a working class girl will neccessarily be better off embodying the qualites/characteristics of elite society. And they do so by revealing that their supposedly sophisticated mentor is to some extent a phony. However, that only works because they put in the effort to sell a genuine belief that their heroines could potentially really be better off if they are taken under the wings of these somewhat eccentric/flawed professors. In Never on Sunday, Dassin wastes no time in making clear that Homer is a bumbling fool and that Ilya is pretty much the most resourceful citizen in all of Piraeus. The rest of the film keeps reinforcing these points, and as a result the story and characters don't really have anywhere to go. It may theoretically be pretty ironic that in trying to save Ilya (who remains an independent contractor throughout, choosing her clients herself depending on who she likes more, regardless of earnings) it's Homer who ends up being on the payroll of the town's main pimp, but it is entirely in line with what we know about Homer or Ilya. There is no real one-upmanship here, and the film, in particular Dassin's performance, is also too broad to really work as a sharp satire or parody.
Still, the film is not without its charms and is at times quite funny. Jules Dassin is clearly a good director who has a lot of fun with shooting group dynamics around Ilya. Whenever there is a difficult situation in town he stuffs the frame with exasperated, slighlty overweight men wating for Ilya to find just the right thing to do or say. She usually does except when she has to interpret a Greek tragedy. She finds happy endings in the stories of Medea and Oedipus, driving Homer to insanity. Although the film presents these misinterpretations as comically naive, it also lets Ilya explain how she gets to them, pointing out to Homer the story elements that make her view these tragedies in her own way. It's a nice contrast to Homer's purely encyclopedic knowledge - he knows Medea is a tragedy, but has never made up his own thoughts on it. It's interesting too that this discussion takes place in an amphiteater on top of the town's acropolis, the one remnant of the classic Greek culture that Homer came to find. He is at his place here, but so are many of the Greeks from the bar and the seashore. The folks we have seen get drunk on ouzo and walk around in half-ripped dirty undershirts are now well-dressed for a theater performance of Medea they watch with great attention. They need no Homer to educate them.
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