Hold Onto Me ★★

For her feature film debut, screening in Karlovy Vary‘s Horizons section after premiering at Sundance’s World Cinema Dramatic Competition in February, Myrsini Aristidou combines two equally popular and problematic family film narratives. One is aimed at adults and says an absent father only needs to be there once, preferably to do something heroic or sacrificing, to make up for a lifetime of neglect and unpaid alimony. The other is aimed at children and says that kids just have to try hard enough and their absent parent will discover their interest in them. These toxic tropes seem made for each other, just like the outwardly adorable father-daughter duo incorporating them. 

Cyprus’ slightly worn-down beach promenades and sun-drenched beaches serve as a melancholy setting for this well-worn story of an early coming-of-age and a belated coming-to-accept responsibility. When precocious Iris (Maria Petrova) hangs out with her teenage friend Danae (Jenny Sallo), to whom she is something of a chosen little sister, she gets word that her estranged father Aris (Christos Passalis) is around. Not for her, but to bury his own father who was as absent in his life as he is now in Iris’s life. Determined to get to know him as much as possible, the 11-year-old protagonist finds him at an old shipyard. His hostile demeanor changes as he recognizes her natural skills. 

With her big eyes and disheveled hair, she is the ideal accomplice for his petty scams. Pretending to be in desperate need of money for his little daughter, Aris sells an old microwave thanks to Iris’s pitiful looks. He cheats a deli owner into refunding their food by having her pretend to be sick and calls her his lucky charm after her intuition at horse racing wins him big money. After years of separation, the two have bonded in merely a day, but director-writer Aristidou leaves no doubt that what seems like a secure cord for Iris, for her father, is only a thin thread, ready to be cut off the moment her grandfather is in the ground. 

Of course, this time it won’t be that simple for him. On a dramatic level, though, it’s all too simple for Aristidou, who settles complacently into predictable patterns, emotionally and narratively. With double-standard dialectics, the plot legitimizes Aris’s indifference and egoism, suggesting that his own father was to blame. Underneath the father-daughter dynamic lurk patriarchal gender concepts, according to which some men are just too wild for boring family routines and it’s put to the women to make their men stay with constant obligation, attention, and submission. If Aris has done anything wrong at all according to ambiguous moral values, he has already been punished enough by not having seen his daughter grow up. 

A natural performance by Maria Petrova and her chemistry both with Christos Passalis and Jenny Sallo lend the familiar blend of family drama and tragicomical children’s film some dramatic momentum. But this can’t outweigh the lack of psychological depth and emotional nuances. Reconciliation comes across as a sudden transformation, with little regard for the personal compromises and effort this shift requires from Aris and her mother. Realism here is only an appealing aesthetic choice for a sophisticated target audience far removed from the working-class life made to look like mischievous fun.