adults in the room (w&d costa gavras, w. yanis varoufakis)

Adults in the Room is a fascinating and unlikely work from the veteran director, Costa Gavras. He’s 89 years old and still hard at it, an inspiration to us all. This is clearly something of a passion project. The film is a fictional account of the events surrounding the Greek financial crisis which began in 2009, following the global crisis and rattled on for years and years. The film picks up with the election of Syriza in 2015, with Tsipras as the new prime minister and Yanis Varoufakis his finance minister. The events the film describes are based on the book by Varoufakis, who is credited as co-writer.

The Greek financial crisis has been lengthy and complex and not, in this day and age, obvious material for a feature film. It is remarkable how the director succeeds in recounting the intricacies of the negotiations of the Greeks with the Troika of financial organisations, managing to both maintain the film’s rhythm as well as never lose the spectator. Part of the film’s thesis is that this is something that the financial organisations desire. They want to obfuscate, they seek to make it seem as though their decisions are beyond the understanding of the common man or woman, and hence have to be taken on trust. Varoufakis and Costa Gavras go about deconstructing this mystical thesis highly effectively. We always understand both points of view, and at the times the conflict makes for great drama. The film feels as though it belongs to a register which cinema has abandoned: a Brechtian exhumation of contemporary political economic history, where cinema seeks to engage the viewer in issues that normally are supposed to go over their head. (The work of Adam Mackay might be one of the few contemporaries working in this vein.) This quasi Shakespearian approach is generally despatched to be dealt with via documentary, with the suggestion that it’s in slightly bad taste to taint the hallowed halls of fictional cinema with these mordant details.

It’s a film which feels as thought it shouldn’t really work and yet it does. I remember following the Greek crisis for years with no real idea of what was occurring. I left Adults in the Room enlightened. The counter-argument to that of the charismatic Varoufakis might perhaps be underplayed, but the issues are clear. It’s also fascinating to watch the presentation of Varoufakis, played by Christos Loulis, a man who for a while seemed like the epitome of some kind of undefined counter cultural messiah. It’s curious how Varoufakis seems to have subsequently dropped off the global radar, no matter how influential he might still be in Greece. The film succeeds in making the viewer contemplate the possibility of another order of things, even if, looking through the prism of Brexit, the endgame feels more ambiguous than the film suggests.