Jorgosclick to enlarge pictures

Maria

The Lovers from Axos



SYNOPSIS

In a village high in the mountains of Crete, 69-year-old Maria works at her loom. Watching Maria is her 73-year-old husband, Jorgos. Jorgos finds Maria so beautiful he occasionally invites passing strangers into the workshop to admire her. The love that bound Maria and Jorgos together when they were were young has endured 55 years and only deepened over time. But something has recently clouded the couple's happiness: Jorgos is seriously ill and could die any minute.
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Andrej Tarkowski, Diaries 1981-1986:

"Love as such has absolutely nothing to do with happiness - and that's the way it should be. Otherwise, love would immediately solidify into an indefinable object of civility. Above all, love is a missing sense of balance and happy love can never aspire to be like that. Even if for a moment it could, those two pitiful people would be like two halves bonded together by a screw. The result is a creation that is absolutely dead. In a relationship such as that everything is impossible. There can never be a breath of wind, neither warn nor hot, to disturb what has become hard and congealed. If you examine a relationship like that you find you are looking at something monstrous, where violence lurks beneath the surface. People like that age biologically speaking very quickly. You can't even look at them. Probably because they contradict everything that is good commonsense."

From the Script to the "Lovers from Axos":

"The relationship that Jorgos and Maria share appears not to fulfil Tarkovsky's definition of love. Outwardly, both lovers look young and are full of life. Inwardly, their relationship bears no resemblance to a Strindbergian couple; it is not dead and lifeless. The film's intention is to show one day in the life of Jorgos and Maria; two people joined together by a love, who live a life that stoics and epicurean philosophers call "peace of mind, equanimity. Epicurean love does not contain the dramatic element of passion. It is the opposite of modern, romantic love and its ideal of mergence and fusion."