By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Review: ATTENBERG
Athina Rachel Tsangari‘s ATTENBERG is one of my favorite films of the past couple of years, and I wrote about it from Sundance in January 2011. Part of that review: “The eccentric activities shared by an architect father and still-unformed daughter in her early twenties, at the end of his life and a century shaped by his work in the small Greek village they live in, knit the disparate elements of Tsangari’s film together. They’re closest when they’re imitating the documentaries of David Attenborough (who provides the title and has the first thank-you in the end credits). Marina hasn’t discovered kissing yet, at least not until a goofy and discomfiting opening scene of rampagingly clumsy face-suck, let alone sex and love. (There is a wealth of awkwardness to come.) “You’re a sea urchin, you won’t let anyone touch you,” Bella tells her.
Other strengths include extremely specific, heightened sound design, as well as a song score that includes work by Suicide, even though 23-year-old Marina is told, “you’re too young to like Suicide.” (Double-entendre present and accounted for.) A scene of deathbed mourning, accompanied by that band’s song “BeBop Kid,” is stark, simple, and surprisingly emotional. It’s a sustained take with strong horizontal elements, hospital room dim, shadows of brown, almost black, and the music plays, a character dances. Pow. Death, meet Suicide. The asperity of Alan Vega‘s spare post-punk pop matches the calculated austerity of Tsangari’s pictorial style.
While ATTENBERG is more gestural than dialogue-driven, the father has a speech about the failure of modern Greece that is as piercing and pungent as anything you hear on the streets of that country in its current economic straits. The father speaks of the now-barren factory town, the film’s setting, that he had helped design, of “the piston” and the sea, of industry and alienation. He describes Greece as a country that missed the industrial revolution, a populace that went from being shepherds to being petit-bourgeois strivers. It’s the rare scene that punches for the nose rather than lovingly constructed uncertainty. But the punch lands, forcefully.”
