Dir: Athina Rachel Tsangari, Greece, 2010, 97 mins, Greek with subtitles
Cast: Ariane Labed, Giorgos Lanthimos, Vangelis Mourikis, Evangelia Randou
Review by Dave Hall
It’s no surprise to discover that director Tsangari, an expat Greek living in America, was associate producer on 2009’s Dogtooth. Here again is a skewed, idiosyncratic look at human behaviour and relationships, played (or underplayed) with deadpan assurance and rippling with dark humour. This one’s a little too arch for its own good and it’s not as satisfying as Dogtooth – it’s more like a filmed performance piece. But it keeps you intrigued if not exactly involved.
Marina (Labed) is an alienated 23 year-old, who regards human beings with the same intellectual fascination that her hero Sir David Attenborough has for animals (yes, the film’s title is a mispronunciation of the great man’s name). She seems more at home imitating the creatures in Attenborough’s natural history documentaries than forming human connections, and so her only relationships are with her dying father (Mourikis) and her friend Bella (Randou), both of whom indulge Marina’s unconventional and readily expressed attitudes to life and sex. The film also takes in Marina’s first, excruciating sexual encounter with Spyros (Lanthimos, Dogtooth’s director): though usually unabashed by mating rituals, even David Attenborough would surely avert his camera from this car crash of a coupling
Tsangari claims that her interest is in biology and zoology rather than psychology, and perhaps she intends Marina’s condition as a natural (and Natural) reaction to her environment. She lives in an anonymous Greek seaside town, dominated by a huge, unidentified industrial complex, and spends large parts of the film in sterile hotel rooms, or the sanitised hospital where her father is receiving treatment. Marina is at her most expressive when imitating gorillas or albatross and the story is punctuated by shots of Marina and Bella, similarly dressed and walking arm in arm, performing heavily stylised dances influenced by the movements of animals and birds. She’s at her most self-conscious when lying naked on her engineer lover, describing in “Attenbergian” details each of her movements as he begs for her to stop her running commentary.
All this is done deadpan, which works well in moments of black comedy, less so in the more serious exchanges, where the stilted dialogue fails to engage. And unlike in Dogtooth, where strange states of being were imposed and threatening, Marina’s condition is largely her own choice and met with benevolence from all those around her. The lack of tension works against Attenberg.
If whimsy isn’t your thing, this is definitely the wrong tree to be barking up. But in its peculiar way this hums along nicely enough and if there’s a Greek Oscar for choreographing actors in animal movement, it’s difficult to see where the competition could be coming from.
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