Everyone in mourning has objects that stir unwanted associations, everyday things that bring the loss to mind. In the case of 10-year-old Yorgos Karayannis in the Greek film Hard Goodbyes: My Father, one shines down on him every night. Karayannis begins the summer of 1969 with a promise from his traveling-salesman father (Stelios Mainas) that they'd take a trip to the moon after the Apollo astronauts made their own jaunt. He ends it knowing that the trip will have to wait. Never a household fixture, Mainas tries to make the most of his visits home, bonding with Karayannis while his less-forgiving wife (Ioanna Tsirigouli) and older son look on. When a car accident removes him from their lives permanently, his family members have to find their own ways of coping with the loss.
Karayannis has the least success. Blessed with a powerful imagination, he uses it to deny the death, carrying on conversations with his dead father, writing letters to his senile grandmother and signing his dad's name, scrapping with schoolmates, and so forth. In short, he's a mess, and it's to the credit of first-time director Penny Panayotopoulou that she captures his pain without resorting to sentiment.
Panayotopoulou's background in photography shows in the way she lets her chiaroscuro lighting mirror her characters' emotions. It also shows in the still-life quality that Hard Goodbyes never quite gets beyond. Though it makes sense not to impose too much structure on her subjects' grief, the formlessness eventually makes it drag. Fortunately, her well-chosen cast moves the narrative along when it gets stuck—particularly Karayannis, who carries the film. He's a sweet kid, but not a cute one, and when he lashes out, it's ugly, bringing all the family's unspoken tensions and uncontrolled grief to the surface. Unlike his Argentinean counterpart in the superficially similar Valentín, Karayannis doesn't spend the time between his own disappointments matchmaking and otherwise improving the lives of others. Maybe he would if he could, but, like everyone in his situation, he first wants the hurting to stop.