Morning Patrol

1987 apocalyptic movie

Rating: 11/20

Plot: Wandering through an apocalyptic wasteland, an amnesiac woman stumbles upon a forbidden city and struggles to figure out who she is and what has happened.

This lacks the aggressive weirdness of the only other Nikos Nikolaidis movie I've seen--Singapore Sling. With its glacial pace, lack of narrative thrust, unengaging characters, and scant dialogue (other than lots of narration), this was a bit of a challenge, even for somebody who really enjoys glacial paces and unengaging characters. The narration, apparently, comes from novels by Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler, and Daphne Du Maurier. Mostly, it just seemed like nonsense that I didn't really need to pay that much attention to. The inability to connect those dots in the narration was as frustrating as the pace, but it's possible that Nikolaidis's goal was to disorient the viewer with the word salad in order to help us empathize with that amnesiac protagonist.

There are loose ends within the story that Nikolaidis also doesn't seem interested in providing explanations for that further disorient. The two that stand out might be the most interesting bits in the movie. In one, the unnamed character wanders into a house, watches a bit of an old movie (maybe The Band Wagon? I know a snippet of that is in here somewhere.) and then is harassed by a radio-controlled car. It's a slightly eerie sequence, but it never seems to matter. Later, the woman is watching another movie in a seemingly abandoned theater and some goggled theater ninjas assault her and, after a cut that yadda-yadda-yaddas their intent, leaves her topless beneath a bunch of loose film. She never reflects on what happened or mentions it to the character she meets later on, so it doesn't seem like this episode really matters at all.

I did enjoy the set design quite a bit. She wanders through Tarkovskian landscapes, down abandoned streets, in subterranean hallways, and through haunting empty shopping malls, and a lot of it looks really cool. I was impressed with the amount of locations, especially since it seems like this movie had to have been pretty cheaply made. It doesn't have nearly the impact or depth of Stalker although it seems to share a lot of those ideas. It's like Nikolaidis thought that all he needed to do to make his own Tarkovsky film was make it really really slow and esoteric.