Filming health

It is not the house that matters. This conclusion is rather difficult to extract from Gold Dust, since its own superficial topic (and sometimes a hasty comment on urban development in general) relates around the selling of a house.

Three siblings have settled to a life in Athens they don't want to. Unfulfilled dreams and anxiety appear when their dead mother's house becomes an issue for a common decision. Argyris (Argiris Xafis) is the divorced lawyer who needs to secure a benefit for his son, Anna (Mania Papadimitriou) is  the ever-romantic pianist who stays close to her childhood memories, and Emilia (Anna Mascha) the married woman who has to stay in between.

The family drama theme around an estate has been explored more directly in Olivier Assayas' Summer Hours. Here the immaculate old scenery and lighting only serves as a clever excuse to evade the grim personal problems the characters face. This works especially for Anna, whose attachment to memory reveals only her need not to move on.

That is why the constant reference to an irritating Athenian public environment (loud motorcycles, taxi driver's racist comments) only weaken the impact of the film, who flirts better with personal love and understanding rather than public policy.

Dialogues and characters (especially Anna' s character) could have been made more interesting and not preachy, but the slow rhythm fits its subject-matter. Narration solves too easily the problems it presents: at some point  two cans of beer may save a failing marriage, while a joke about a suit eliminates the warlike atmosphere from a brother-sister relationship.

But Margarita Manda is consistent in her attempt to talk about ordinary human relationships that concern most .  Anna Mascha and Argyris Xafis light this film beyond the house dust, that has made their own cinematic mother suffocate.