By Peter Aspden, Financial Times

I was in Greece last month when that country’s distinguished film director Michael Cacoyannis died at the age of 89. It is not a name that means much to non-Greeks these days, and his greatest movie, Zorba the Greek, is hardly known by anyone under the age of 50. You can’t say the same of the film’s soundtrack, which accelerates towards its demented climax in every taverna in Greece (and, for that matter, north London).

I perfectly understand those who would be happy never to listen to that tune again. But the film is more sophisticated. It has always been this column’s contention that the greatest cultural works speak resonantly of things far beyond the cultural realm, and here’s the thing: I can’t help feeling that the world’s economists would better understand the nature of the Greek financial crisis if they were to sit in a darkened room with Zorba for a couple of hours.

The film is based on the novel by Cretan writer Nikos Kazantzakis, and tells the story of an uptight Englishman, played by Alan Bates, who travels to Crete and encounters the life-enhancing, terminally irresponsible Zorba, played by Anthony Quinn. Bates has manners and education; Zorba has animal magnetism and the ability to dance. Weirdly, they get on.

Kazantzakis was far too subtle a writer to portray the Cretan society as some kind of romanticised idyll. There was a darkness in his story that was faithfully reproduced by Cacoyannis: the stoning of an adulterous widow, the ransacking by local villagers of a wealthy foreigner’s house just moments after she dies.

I was reminded, watching Greek television obituaries, that Cacoyannis was roundly criticised by his countrymen for sending this message around the world: that Greece in the 1960s was in many respects a brutal and rather primitive society, despite the best intentions of its political classes to drag it into the modern world.

But if they thought the film would put people off, they were spectacularly wrong. Along with Never on Sunday, released four years earlier and featuring another life-enhancing and terminally irresponsible character, a happy whore played by Melina Mercouri, Zorba the Greek was the greatest advertisement Greece would ever have. Foreigners forgot about the stoning and ransacking, and gasped in wonderment at the spontaneity of it all. Here was a country where you could simply dance your troubles away. Where you could let loose with your emotions but always be forgiven for your roguish charm. Where charisma counted for more than measured judgment.

For too long, the west’s most advanced societies were in thrall to Greece for the wrong reasons: for the glory of its ancient philosophers, politics and art, which shaped western civilisation. But as Nietzsche, another man who loved a party, had reminded us, Greece was all about Dionysian abandonment as well as Apollonian good sense and restraint.

This inconvenient fact had been forgotten in the decorous societies of the Enlightenment era. But here was 20th-century popular culture putting Nietzsche’s thesis into the mass market; and the mass market loved it. Tourism took off in Greece, as uptight northerners fled to the beaches in search of the spirit of Zorba: scorching heat, easy sex, a glorious disdain for prim respectability.

Zorba the Greek ends in disaster, then triumph. The disaster is Zorba’s plan to ferry timber down a hill to help open an old lignite mine. The elaborate contraption he has devised collapses; the two men have lost their investment. Alan Bates, trussed up in a white suit and tie, is at first devastated, but then asks his friend: “Teach me how to dance. Will you?”

Together, they dance the sirtaki on the beach. Before you can say catharsis, Mikis Theodorakis’s theme tune swells; the dance is frenzied; Dionysus has triumphed over the forces of order.

It didn’t end there. The wine-god’s victory was replayed endlessly in succeeding years. In Shirley Valentine, a Liverpudlian housewife finds self-knowledge in the sensuous haze of congress with Tom Conti’s fisherman-lover, a kind of Zorba-lite. In My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Wasp values are crushed by bouzouki-wielding sybarites. In Mamma Mia, Meryl Streep – Meryl Streep! – makes merry with former lovers on her island of delights.

You will not, of course, be expecting a penetrating analysis of the Greek financial crisis in this space. But I leave you with these thoughts: Zorba was great for the balance of payments but could the Greeks themselves have become rather too infatuated with him? With the roguish charm, the charisma, the terminal irresponsibility? With the devil-may-care attitude towards economic planning?

Well, the devil does care. And so does the rest of the world. It was the abiding achievement of Athenian classicism that it understood this precarious balance, between the forces of order and chaos, that made for peace and prosperity. The perfect proportions of the Parthenon symbolised the attainment of that equilibrium. But it was no more than an evanescent moment. War and destruction were around the corner.

Being of half-Greek parentage, I naturally wish Greece well in its efforts to find a way out of its current predicament. But please, enough with Zorba. He was a fool. It’s good to be uptight about the budget deficit. And some troubles just can’t be danced away.