Until about a year ago references to Greece
would conjure up images of beaches, sunsets and ruins. It's a long time since
Byron went to fight for its freedom. Of course it has been touched by various wars, had its coup d'etats, military rule and revolutions, but by and
large Greece has been synonymous with ageless beauty, olives and the good life.
For now, however, that image has been displaced. Greece is now a
front line on the global economic battleground. Middle class people riot and
sleep in the streets. Politicians and financiers regularly speculate about its
demise. Economic journalists head there to reveal the shape of a dystopian
European future.
In retrospect, Dogtooth, Lanthimos' brilliant movie,
seems to have been giving out warning signs. Within a walled garden, all was
not what it seemed. Something was going horribly wrong in the Greek state and the chickens were coming home to roost. Tsangari, who has spent a
good deal of time in the States, is credited as associate producer on Dogtooth.
Attenberg is being marketed in Dogtooth's slipstream and it too bucks against
the previous bucolic images of the country.
The film is set in a coastal resort, but it's a
coastal resort in Winter. As Morrissey observed, coastal resorts in Winter can
be depressing. Even more so when your father is dying of cancer, as is the case
with the film's virginal heroine, Marina, played by the impressive Ariane
Labed, who somewhat curiously happens to be French, not that you'd notice. Marina
has issues. She’s 23 and she’s never had sex. She practices kissing with her
on-off friend, Bella. She imagines her father naked. Together they watch David
Attenborough shows (hence the film’s curious title) and sometimes act out as
gorillas. When she finally goes to bed with a man, she talks so much it puts
him off. This makes for one of the funniest sex scenes ever filmed. It’s almost
as though Marina is inhabiting the flip side of the Greek Summer idyll. Her
father is an architect who would appear to have helped develop the resort. But
the view from the apartments is always grey and unwelcoming.
There’s a hint of the dysfunctional US indie drama
here, with a strong female twist. Death is coming and Marina is going to have
to cope with her grief. However, in contrast to a North American sensibility,
there’s no bittersweet pay-off. Once her father’s ashes have been scattered,
the film switches to a long static shot, of little apparent relevance, in what
looks like a cement factory. There’s a feeling that the ending is less moving
than we would want it to be; but that is also exactly right. In an echo of
Dogtooth’s harsh edges, Tsangari flirts with the themes of sentimentality but
then resists them, reluctant to give the audience what it wants.
Which is not to say that the film is not warm and
sensitively told. Perhaps the one adjective it resists from that compendium of
adjectives which describe films which deal with death and sex, is “human”. One
gets the impression that Tsangari would prefer the adjective “animal”. Not in a
nasty sense, but in the sense that our assumed notions of evolution and
progress aren’t quite as valid as we like to think. We manage to make the
simple things in life, like sex and dying, incredibly complicated. Which means
that the supposed virtues of ‘civilization’ are not as impressive as its
marketing.
There are occasional longeurs in Tsangari’s film. But
its so full of unlikely and brilliant moments that they don’t matter. Whether
the Greek new wave is showing us the future of the European dream or not is
open to debate. But it is producing some remarkable cinema.
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