Can there be love without sentimentality? What happens when biology and reason, instead of emotion or desire, are the driving forces in a person’s world? ATTENBERG, a new film by Greek director Athina Rachel Tsangari, asks these questions while simultaneously riding on the new wave of cutting-edge contemporary Greek cinema. Featured as a selection in this year’s New Directors/New Films series at MoMA and Lincoln Center, ATTENBERG is enjoying a positive reception at its first American screenings.
The film takes its title from a character’s mispronunciation of the last name of Sir David Attenborough, whose films are the protagonist’s main source of social observation. Marina (a lovely and confrontational Ariane Labed) is 23-years old—a devoted daughter whose world is filled solely by the presence of Attenborough, her dying architect father, and her best (and only) friend, Bella. The characters seem to be the only people who populate the desolate industrial seaside town which her father helped design in the 1960s.
While Marina is exploring her latent sexuality through pantomiming Sir Attenborough’s nature films, her terminally-ill father tries to come to terms with the stark city he designed. Both father and daughter enjoy an exceptionally close relationship, despite the fact that their bond is not visibly emotional. Through honest debates about biology and sexuality, word games, and make-believe, their small family comes to profoundly understand sex, death, and love.
ATTENBERG co-stars Giorgios Lanthimos, the writer-director of Dogtooth, last year’s breakout Greek cinema tableaux. Comparisons between the two films are inevitable: both films explore the worlds of adult children who haven’t been given the necessary tools for negotiating the modern world (and both films include disarming, awkward dance sequences which make the viewers’ skin crawl). But whereas the parents’ impetus in Dogtooth was abuse, the driving force in ATTENBERG is love. Marina’s father didn’t instruct her to be alone—he taught her to be self-reliant.
"It would be too reductive to insist on attributing Marina's self-willed seclusion to a matter of alienated living in a not-quite-post-industrial environment," writes Andrew Schenker in Slant. "Though unlike the film's obvious point of comparison, Dogtooth, which depicted, by contrast, an enforced seclusion, social context is an important matter here. Finally, as Marina begins to bridge the gap of her isolation and prepares for her father's death, her standing on the threshold of a new century (if, per the father's words, the film takes place around 2000), as cinema then stood on the verge of its own now largely completed digital shift (ATTENBERG was defiantly shot on 35mm), is hugely significant. Tsangari's is ultimately a film that asks how one can be expected to cope with life in what might be termed post-post-modernity. The film's varied segments serve as the answers: an anarchic sense of play; the movies, including this one, that provide us with this manic brand of release; music; sex, of course; and, possibly even, if we're lucky, love."
ATTENBERG is a beautiful, arresting, and troubling film, and Tsangari’s work is a strong argument for the strength of contemporary Greek cinema. Highly recommended.
Read more about the New Directors/New Films series here: http://newdirectors.org/
