Attenberg (Friday, February 24, 2012) (18)

When watching Athina Rachel Tsangari's film Attenberg, it is important to keep in mind that the writer-director got a masters in Performance Studies. Her film is as much a study of motion, dance and performance as it is a narrative. Considering this fact is also central in understanding that this is not a typical film with a standard "A to B" structure, nor is it an "easy" movie where you walk out feeling happy that you just saw some nice storytelling.

It is a challenging and a strangely cold film, though a totally beautiful one. It is one of the most interesting movies I've seen in a long time. It feels very much like Giorgos Lanthimos' brilliant 2010 film Dogtooth (for which Tsangari was an Associate Producer), though much more human and relatable.

The film centers on Marina (Ariane Labed), a 23-year-old woman who takes care of her father Spyros (Vangelis Mourikis) in the last stages of cancer treatment. They live in a small mining town on the water that Spyros designed at some point in the past 30 years, now seeming to have nearly no inhabitants in it. It's a typical Modernist village, with rectilinear streets and buildings, awkward public spaces and difficult, cold interiors.

When she's not taking her father to the hospital for his tests, Marina spends much of her time driving visiting scientists around for the local mining firm. As the story goes on, her main rider is an engineer (Lanthimos... yes, the same guy who directed Dogtooth) who she finds theoretically attractive, despite the fact that she's generally not interested in sex and has no experience with it.

One of her main interests is hanging out with her best friend Bella (Evangelia Randou). The two almost exclusively talk about sex; Bella is a normal 23-year-old who likes sex, has a boyfriend and likes talking about it and she's rather obsessed with teaching Marina all she knows. Marina, meanwhile, seems reticent about her sexuality or any erotic emotions.

All of this is rather simple and straightforward and makes up most of the plot ... which is to say very little happens in this story. What keeps it interesting the whole time, though, is that Tsangari formally tells a separate story, different from the general narrative. The film is a master class in the differences and effects of static and moving camera work. Almost all of the standard narrative elements are shot with static shots. Tsangari has a keen eye for composition and these shots are almost all interesting, contrasting deep shots with shallow ones and characters at different points in space .

In the middle of all these static story-telling scenes, Tsangari intercuts sequences of uncanny dance and movement performed by Marina and Bella. At first glance these seem a bit out of place and disconnected, and they all use moving cameras. Why this stark change in style all of a sudden? Well, these near-nondiegetic moments seem to function as some sort of dream-space, or at least non-chronological pieces of the story. Both characters intently look at the camera as they do these actions, reminding us that we are watching two performers, who might be the characters we know them as, but might just be two random people dancing. Certainly these dynamic shots are more liberating than the rest of the static ones.

There's a wonderful long dolly shot following Marina pushing Spyros down a long hall in the hospital. Here is where the dream world crosses over for a moment with the earthly, Modernist world. In fact, the whole film functions as a long and effective criticism of Modernist ideals. For one thing, Spyros himself criticizes his own design, saying he built this unnatural space on the top of sheep meadows. He gets into the concept that there was not a natural evolution in this town (or perhaps in Greece in general) from one era to another (from agriculture to industry), but that the Modernist era came along and sat on history, forcing its emotionless will on everything. He's ashamed of his greatest accomplishment as he gets ready to face the unknown. (There's an interesting analysis of the current Greek debt crisis here, more incisive than many news reports.)

This leads Marina's other main hobby, which is watching the nature films of Sir David Attenborough. Both Spyros and Marina (when he's at home and not in the hospital) love to watch the scientist talk about monkeys and other jungle creatures and sometimes re-enact their strange movements and screams. She seems to have a connection with natural, evolutionary things more than she does with other people. She is the product of Modernism, devoid of deep sentiment and disconnected from other things. The title of the film, at this point, becomes a Modernist respelling of Attenborough's name.

Tsangari has all the actors speaking their lines in particularly monotone, dispassionate style, possibly inspired by Richard Maxwell or other Post-Modern theater or performance creators. Again, this underlines the strangeness and non-humanness of the setting and the people in the film. All of the actors are wonderful, but particularly Labed and Mourikis, who seem to have a fun time as they do mundane things (and also seem to interact in a wonderful and intimate way that fathers and daughters who love one another really do).

This is a deeply interesting and thematically difficult film. Whereas Lanthimos' Dogtooth was a bit of joke, playing mostly with semiotics in a bizarro non-place, Attenberg seems to take the argument one step farther. Tsangari shows how the Modernist legacy in every-day life has magnified certain behaviors and alienated us from our natural states of being. She raises simple bathos to near holy, fetishistic levels, mixing weirdness and beauty in connected (and disconnected) moments. This is what modernity is. She does this all in a gorgeous and elegant way with techniques far beyond her years.

Stars: 4 of 4

Dogtooth (Saturday, June 26, 2010) (57)

More than a movie *about* anything, Dogtooth is really an artistic exercise, as much about the medium and about art itself than anything else.

The film focuses on a middle-class Greek family who live in the remote suburbs outside of town. The film opens with the three kids, all in their late teens listening to a tape recording of new vocabulary words. The "sea" is an armchair; a "motor way" is a really strong wind (later we see that a "telephone" is a salt shaker). Then the kids then devise a game where they hold a finger under the hot water and the last person to remove it will win. "What will we call this game?," asks one of them. The sister who has invented the game looks blankly at the floor. She has no idea what the game would be called.

This play with definitions, naming things and people and control of language is the central point of this film. The parents have set out a world where their kids are kept in the house and the small yard of the estate and told that on the outside of the wall are horrible, violent "cats" that will kill and eat them. They have no access to anything other than exactly what their parents give to them. No access to language, ideas or dreams. The parents have told them that they can leave the house when one of their dogteeth (canines) comes out. Of course, being the age they are, this is unlikely to happen ever. The kids seem to have been socialized to be dogs, rather than humans.

The father brings a woman over to have sex with the son. It seems this is part of his training as a man (to be a sexually dominant being) and also, possibly, a way to keep him in line (it might otherwise be tough to control a hormonal 19-year-old young man). This woman doesn't ask questions and plays along with some of the kids weird games. When she starts trading things from the outside world, uncontrolled things, with the older sister, the strict rules of the house start to go out of whack.

This is a totally fascinating post-modern experiment. The interplay between what the kids know from their parents and what they can make up themselves is wonderful. The idea that they can remain at the developmental level of young children without the influences of culture or society is shocking and pretty convincing.

The parents are cruel in their ways, and there are several suggestions that the father is prone to acts of violence. As a result, the children interact with one another frequently in violent ways. Just as sex is disassociated from it's cultural mores, violence has no position on a scale of right and wrong. Everything is OK as long as it's done inside the house - a world built up and protected by the parents.

This split between a thing and the meaning of a word that describes it (the sign and the symbol, as semiologists would say) is fascinating, not only because it tells an interesting story in the film, but also because of how we react to it as viewers. Is cutting someone with a knife across the arm necessarily a bad thing if the people involved in the act don't know it's bad? If a person doesn't have a name, is their existence different from those with names? Is incest bad if there is no concept of brother/sisterhood and social convention?

Director (and co-writer) Giorgos Lanthimos does a brilliant job of separating film convention from the core of the presentation format. There is no score, there are almost no moving shots. Scenes play out in full, generally with one static camera before being cut away, rendering editing almost totally unnecessary.

The result is a beautiful, tight piece that has almost nothing more than pure story-advancing material. Much of what we see is pretty funny, though we are basically laughing at the people onscreen, rather than laughing with them (the parents are certainly not funny people and the children don't seen to know what humor is).

I think this is another important part of the experiment: we laugh at things that make us uncomfortable (in this case, weird, disassociated violence or weird misunderstandings of people who can't comprehend most of what they experience). We do this because we understand the whole context of things and where an outlier fits in (or doesn't fit in) to that situation. These kids, for instance, only see a very small view of things that have been specifically explained to them. Part of why they don't laugh more is because they don't know enough to know when something is not totally right.

I have enjoyed thinking about this film and breaking down the meaning of parts. There is a lot of fun and interesting material to work with. I will say, though, that there is somewhat of a limit to the depth of meaning I can find. It might be fun to examine the mother's role, say, in the development of the kids, or to look at why the parents might do this in the first place. Unfortunately there are not a lot of answers to these questions, because the material presented is so limited, the film is just so tight.

This is a difficult piece to be sure - but I really enjoyed it. It's weirdness is what's great about it. It constantly surprising us and shocking us with unexpected things. It's really a brilliant work of art.

Stars: 3.5 of 4