Public Enemy review – anatomy of Greece’s economic crisis framed as epic tragedy

Elisa Mantin’s film shows Greeks as the economic victims of ideologically motivated EU forces, imposing punishment-via-austerity

Maybe the true Greek tragedy is the temptation to interpret everything that happens in that country under the long Hellenic shadow of history. It is former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis who suggests here that the 2010s debt crisis was akin to an ancient tragedy, with the likes of him, prime minister Alexis Tsipras and a slowly strangulated populace at the mercy of overweening Olympian (or rather, European) forces. We should probably pay attention to the idea – but maybe more so to his parting suggestion that this drama doesn’t completely conform to the classical pattern, either.

Director Elisa Mantin’s melancholic but partisan film makes it clear that the hubris was on the Euro troika side. Varoufakis, a sympathetic François Hollande, a clutch of former Syriza ministers, and others describe the ideologically motivated chastising-via-austerity of the country by a Brussels technocracy for whom, says Varoufakis, Greek democracy was an afterthought. The negotiations took place in brutalising 10-hour Eurogroup meetings that were unrecorded and unminuted – all the better to spin things in the press later.

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