O Attic Shapes!

Young Aphrodites, directed by Nikos Koundouros.

There really was a land of Arcadia. A pile of rocks

In the Peloponnese, it just sat there until Theocritus,

A pastoral poet, put it on the map as a literary

Weekend retreat for tired Greek businessmen.

In hexametric idylls, he described the pretty place

As a sort of Aegean Acapulco overpopulated

With hearty herdsmen in puffing pursuit of nubile nymphs

--And let the goats roam where they may. After two millennia,

This film reconstitutes Arcadia as a state of mind.

It tells the sad sweet story of Daphnis and of Chloe,

A herdsman and a water sprite, how they loved and lost.

In luminous frames it celebrates the bouldered shores

Of Attica, the softer charms of the nymph who plays the nymph.

In pulsing episodes it ventures to display the hot young herdsmen

Bouncing their brides in broad daylight, as the boys in the idylls did.

The idylls grew like plants in the soil f ancient Greece;

To construct one now is to construct an artificial flower,

A plastic Parthenon. Keats after all did not

Simply reproduce the Grecian urn he took delight in;

He let it inspire a creative delirium, a new work of art.

This picture, like this review, cannot be called

An idyll merely because it is made in the form of an idyll.

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