‘The Lion at My Back’ Review: Bleak Cyprus Drama of Female Friendship

There’s much to admire in The Lion at My Back, a Cyprus-set story of two women, one a recovering addict (Elena Kallinikou), the other a teenage Senegalese refugee (Sokhna Diallo). But despite its evocative atmosphere, fine performances and striking cinematography, Greek Cypriot director Tonia Mishiali’s follow-up to her well-received debut Pause is stippled with a few too many dramatic clichés. Even so, its positive message about female friendship and found families — and mostly English dialogue — is likely to help it along to further festivals following its premiere in Karlovy Vary’s main competition.

Mariama (Dialo) is first met celebrating her 18th birthday in the woman’s shelter she’s been living in for some time, her only home since she arrived in Cyprus on a flimsy boat, seeking sanctuary from a forced marriage back in Senegal. But for all the singing and dancing at the little birthday bash, this is a melancholy occasion as well because Mariama will have to make her own way in Cyprus now with scant assistance from the state. Homeless when the landlords she approaches slam their doors in her face, implicitly because of racism, Mariama keeps coming back and climbing the fence to stay near her friends at the shelter.

Her plight is observed by Stella (Kallinikou), a cleaner in her late 30s or so who not only works for low wages but also has to do regular urine tests to prove she’s not taking drugs. Stella shares an apartment with a posse of younger women who openly abuse substances all around her, a temptation she must struggle with although so far she only takes a cannabis-based tincture everyday to cope with stress. That, however, would show up on the drug test, so Stella offers Mariama a deal: a futon to sleep on in her laundry room in exchange for a pristine urine sample from the younger woman.

Although stony-faced and intimidating when first met, Stella has a softer side as well as reasons to be so bitter and brusque. She had a daughter, but the kid (now about seven or eight), to whom she’s been denied access, is being raised by Stella’s mother ever since Stella went to jail. In dribs and drabs we learn that Stella was once a prostitute, working for a sleazebag pimp known only in the credits as “The Suit” (Prokopis Agathokleous). He would dearly like to get Stella back in his stable, especially as she was very good back in the day at being a submissive at sex parties he organized, where customers could lead her around on a leash and urinate on her for fun. Now, desperate to raise enough cash for a deposit on an apartment where she could have her daughter to stay, Stella is tempted to go back on the game one last time. But will she be able to cope with it while sober?

The climactic sequence in which we see the nature of Stella’s sex work is very Requiem for a Dream-coded, shot in lurid fluorescent lighting with tight close-ups on the victim’s stricken face as techno music blares out. Meanwhile, sweet Mariama seems to have wandered into a Dardenne Brothers-movie when she gets a job working for a butcher but must endure leering and the hint of sexual violence from co-workers. The one exception is big softie Pantelis (Herodotos Miltiadous), a co-worker who some viewers, used to films in which bad things inevitably happen, might immediately mistrust as too good to be true. Even worse, “The Suit” takes notice of Mariama and wants to make a deal that Stella’s “debts” to him will be paid in full if she brings him the nubile younger woman in order that he may profit from her despoilment.

It’s all a bit relentlessly bleak, even accounting for scenes where the women tentatively bond with one another, and there’s very little of the humor that made Pause’s own darkness more bearable. At least the two lead actresses have chemistry with one another, and the much less experienced Dialo holds her own, despite having gotten the part at the last minute after another actor had to drop out. Kallinikou has presence to burn, even if her tart-with-a-heart storyline is as old as a Greek tragedy but without the poetry.