The Economist On The Dark, “Wonderfully Weird” New Greek Cinema
Posts Tagged ‘Dogtooth’
The Economist On The Dark, “Wonderfully Weird” New Greek Cinema
Sunday, December 18th, 2011Review: ATTENBERG, dir. Athina Rachel Tsangari
Thursday, January 20th, 2011
Athina Rachel Tsangari’s weird and beautiful ATTENBERG—all-caps because the filmmaker says it “looks better”; it also looks more like Greek letterforms that way—is a moving marvel from modern Greece, with some of the most deliciously startling moments of any movie I saw in 2010. Tsangari, co-founder of Austin’s Cinematexas International Short Film Festival, debuted the film at Venice; it also played Toronto and Thessaloniki, where I saw it in December.
Sales agent Match Factory’s elusive synopsis: “Marina [Ariane Labed], 23, is growing up with her architect father in a prototype factory town by the sea. Finding the human species strange and repellent, she keeps her distance. Instead she chooses to observe it through the songs of Suicide, the mammal documentaries of Sir David Attenborough, and the sexual-education lessons she receives from her only friend, Bella [Evangelia Randou]. A stranger [Yorgos Lanthimos, director of Dogtooth] comes to town and challenges her to a foosball duel, on her own table. Her father [Vangelis Mourikis] meanwhile ritualistically prepares for his exit from the 20th century, which he considers to be ‘overrated.’ Caught between the two men and her collaborator, Bella, Marina investigates the wondrous mystery of the human fauna.”
Labed took Best Actress prize at Venice, and her warmth inside a stylized, comic yet gloriously distanced movie, is the film’s true heart. The eccentric activities shared by architect father and still-unformed daughter, 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 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. “Marina is not afraid of human contact, she is just repelled by it,” Tsangari told OZON magazine for its December 2010 issue, “like for example we are repelled by a cockroach. She only goes on with it when she feels ready and actually makes the first step.”
Other strengths include the 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 Suicide’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.
Here’s a measure of the myriad ambiguities of the film: Tsangari, in an extended interview in Cinema Scope 45, interprets her movie differently. For instance, the passages that seem like a provocative use of movement, as in many moments in Dogtooth, which she co-produced. “People call what they’re doing dance, but we call it silly walks. The two girls had to create their own code of behavior and movement in this place where they’re outsiders. I like it when characters become ridiculous or self-mocking, so we started by doing penguin walks or whatever came through our heads, but because we all love Monty Python we moved on to that, started copying them, and then improvised variations. The idea was that they would frustrate the drama on purpose. It’s like in Greek tragedy—you have the chorus, which is simply moving across the stage chanting, as a commentary on the plot and then you continue. Each silly walk if you notice is a commentary on the plot. Initially, I thought the film would be structured as a Western, but with interludes as a musical. To me, we had a typical story of a Western: two main heroes in a small remote town, and then a stranger comes to town and changes the equilibrium. There is a showdown, someone dies, life goes on, but it doesn’t. That idea was a structural tool for me more than anything. It helps me, working with genre as a template and then stripping it down. I don’t separate form from content. To me they’re inseparable: Siamese twins not separated at birth. So ATTENBERG was meant to be Western + science fiction + screwball comedy + Greek tragedy. It’s also none of these things, of course. But I used these various genres’ ‘genetic’ codes to keep me in line with archetypal narrative structures, and rescue myself from naturalism.” To which I can only say, sure, yes, that also obtains. The Greek trailer, which is beautiful in its own right as a short cut to Alan Vega’s pulse (with brief nudity) is here. [Tsangari, center below, between filmmakers Mike Ott and Rafi Pitts. Photo © 2011 Ray Pride.] 
Top Ten Feature Films 2010
Tuesday, December 21st, 2010I really struggled over my top ten list this year. There were maybe six films that were pretty hard locks early on, which only left four open slots for the rest of a field of strong contenders — not a lot of wiggle room in a year with a good many solid films rightfully in contention for top ten lists.
For the most part, I think the films that made the final cut onto my top ten list will not come as a surprise if you know me and the types of films I tend to like more than others.
Some of the films that did not make the final cut for me, though, may surprise you, and I’d like to say a few words about that. First, there were several other films to which I gave thoughtful consideration (and if this had been a Top 20 list, they likely would have been on it); some of them are smaller films, and not all have distribution, so I’d like to recognize their excellence.
They are, in no particular order: For the Good of Others, Secret Sunshine, Father of My Children, The Vicious Kind, The Illusionist, and Shutter Island. I Saw the Devil, which was one of my favorite films at TIFF, would have made my top ten, but since it’s supposed to be released here in March, I’ll hold off and include it next year.
And it might come as a surprise, given the number of artsy films on my list, to learn that the two films that came closest to making my Top Ten list but just missed are Kick-Ass and Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World.
And while I haven’t done a lot of Oscar prognosticating yet, I will say right now that The Illusionist is my pick for Best Animated Film over Toy Story 3, fond as I am of Woody, Buzz and the gang.
There are not any documentaries on my top ten, not because there were no good docs this year, but because I find it very hard to compare features to docs; there’s a reason fests and the various awards separate the categories. So I will have a Top 5 (maybe 10) Docs list in a day or so. Yes, yes, it’s a bit of a cop-out. Sorry. I’d rather put the spotlight on the docs separately, though.
The most notably absent of the major awards-contending feature films on my final list are The Fighter, The Kids Are All Right, and The Social Network. Of these, The Fighter came the closest to making the cut, but in the end I found that the acting, for me, was stronger than the writing, and that it was problematic for the supporting characters in the film (particularly Dickie and Alice) to be more flawed and interesting on the surface (which is what the script and director chose to show us) than the main character.
Mark Wahlberg’s younger brother Mickey was the more psychologically complex character in his quieter way, but he wasn’t as showy as Christian Bale’s malnourished crack addict or Melissa Leo’s flamboyant stage mother; that’s a writing and directorial decision that made it hard to know who we were supposed to be rooting for — Mickey? Or Dickie? Or both? Or all of them? That said, there was a subtlety to Mark Wahlberg’s performance that I found very moving, and Amy Adams, reaching outside her comfort zone, is excellent.
I enjoyed The Kids Are All Right, for the most part, but again, for me it was a film driven more by the excellent performances by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore than by the direction or script. I applaud Lisa Cholodenko for her handling of the subject matter and for the originality of the idea, but the execution I found problematic. I already devoted an entire column to this subject, though, so I’ll leave it at that.
And then we have The Social Network by far the most popular kid in the Top Ten lunchroom this year. There’s some good acting in there, and it’s an entertaining enough film, although I still take issue with the way Mark Zuckerberg is portrayed — not so much with Jesse Eisenberg’s performance, which is solid, but with the way the character is scripted by Aaron Sorkin. There are some cleverly edited scenes in there (but if you put them side-be-side with similar scenes from Wall Street 2, are they really head-and-shoulders above?).
I suppose Social Network reflects the “cultural zeitgeist,” and critics love them some cultural zeitgeist about as much as they love seeing reflections of themselves in a movie. It’s certainly true that the last 15 years or so have been a remarkable bit of our societal growth to be a part of. I get that. And as a regular Facebook user, I admit it was kind of cool watching this film and seeing the birth of a website that’s become a regular tool I use in my own work and life to stay connected with friends, family and colleagues scattered far and wide.
But Social Network did not, for me, represent David Fincher’s best effort as a director, particularly when I compare it to the sheer balls of Darren Aronofsky in making the crazy, beautiful Black Swan as a follow-up to The Wrestler, or the brilliance of Chris Nolan in conceiving and bringing to life a starkly daring and creative bit of genius like Inception. It doesn’t match the artistry with which Danny Boyle and Simon Beaufoy attacked what could have been a Lifetime Movie of the Week in 127 Hours, spinning a a compelling, gorgeously shot film out of a story about a guy stuck alone in a crevice in the wilderness with his arm pinned by a rock. It cannot stand against the meticulous process with which Mike Leigh worked with his cast in crafting Another Year, or the poignant honesty and deep sadness of Rabbit Hole, or the rich, full exploration of what it means to live and to die in Biutiful. These films captured raw, honest, flawed and deeply human characters acting and reacting to each other in ways that make us feel like we have been gifted with a rare and insightful mirrors that reflect back to us our own humanity.
There are some solid performances in Social Network, yes . But even looking at the acting, there’s not a performance in The Social Network that has the depth and soul of Javier Bardem’s dying father in Biutiful, the sheer guts of Natalie Portman’s tragic perfectionist in Black Swan, the anguished loneliness of Lesley Manville in Another Year, the clarity and honesty of Hailee Steinfeld in True Grit. Or for that matter, the chemistry of Chloe Moretz and Nic Cage in Kick-Ass.
You, of course, are free to disagree with what made my list and what did not, and no doubt many of you have your own thoughts to share on why you disagree with my choices and reasoning. That’s the best thing, to me, about top tens — they provide an opportunity to hone down the year and then engage in energetic debate about our choices. My top docs list is coming soon, and after the holidays I’ll break it down further with my picks for who should win at the Oscars, all political BS aside.
All that said, here are my Top Ten Feature Films of 2010:
1. Biutiful
2. Another Year
3. Black Swan
4. 127 Hours
5. True Grit
6. Winter’s Bone
7. Rabbit Hole
8. Inception
9. Blue Valentine
10. Dogtooth
Teasing Athina Rachel Tsangari’s ATTENBERG (nudity)
Wednesday, September 29th, 2010From a co-producer of Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth; impressive word from Toronto-goers like Daniel Kasman. Haven’t seen Dogtooth? The Greek theatrical release trailer is below.
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