I REALLY wanted to see this movie.

I've been wanting to see this movie for some time. I am a huge Laura Morante fan and I watched six seasons of Richard Sammel in 'Un Village Francais', where I had to find my own French subtitles then run them through Google Translate to get iffy English versions. 'Appartamento ad Atene', the movie in Italian, became available in the greyer parts of the internet, but subtitles in any language have never appeared.

I took matters into hand and ordered the Italian DVD from Amazon of Italy. Once received, I copied the DVD to my computer, ran an Optical Recognition program to pull off the Italian subtitles in a text format which I put through Google Translate to come up with my own English subs.

In fairness, my home-made subtitles were perfect in some parts, gobbledygook in other... including two key sentences at the end. However, the movie, to me, was a huge disappointment. The premise is that a gruff German Officer takes over a family's apartment in Greece, turning them into his servants. He goes back to Germany for a short while then returns to their home as a changed man.

While a fair bit of time is taken to show the Officer's arrogant attitude during the first half of the movie, little time nor explanation is given for his drastic, nearly unnatural, turnaround. Towards the end, one simple sentence is the reason for the movie's over-reactionary, unseen ending.

Perhaps the screen adaptation would have been better-done as a stage-play setting, taking more time for the main story to evolve. There are two story-lines that seem (arguably) to take up time without really advancing the narrative. The son is punished overly-harshly for an indiscretion that we don't see well, and the family visits the grave of a deceased son. Yes, both are relative to the story but the screen time might have been better spent.

While I'm sure my questionable subtitles didn't help, overall, the movie was - sadly - not worth the effort that I put in.