With this sensitive film Angelopoulos has perfected his usual approach of carefully-choreographed and lengthy planned sequences to the utmost. The film takes an penetrating, emotional and almost metaphysical look at the topical issue of refugees.In a drab border village, many refugees live in a kind of ghetto. The spot is a no-man’s land, the end of the world. The locals call it `The Waiting Room’. Refugees of various nationalities (Greeks, Albanians, Turks and Kurds) have been forced to settle here because they cannot or dare not return and are not allowed any further. While making an item about them, TV reporter Alexandre becomes obsessed by one of them: an old man who lives in an old railway carriage. He has apparently been there a long time, because he lives off the potatoes which he cultivates in the ground alongside the rails. Alexandre thinks the man (played by Marcello Mastroianni) is a Greek writer-politician who had disappeared several years earlier in mysterious circumstances. Before his disappearance, the man was very controversial because of the publication of a book in which he fundamentally criticised established political and ideological values. Alexandre persuades the politician’s wife (played by Jeanne Moreau) to come to the village in the hope of a spectacular identification.Against this background, Angelopoulos provides a moving picture of the position of the refugee. They live on the border between two countries, between two lives, but they are not able to take the next step; they are forced to remain standing on one leg like a stork.
