Attenberg (2012)

Instant Favorite.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Attenberg is a weird movie. Greek cinema is full of this kind of film, and it don't make of any of it movies less impactive. The films may be a little hard to common audiences, but there is a certain delight in it.Director Athina Rachel Tsangari puts her female look in a Greece at an imminent crisis, a Greece that still the mother of western culture, but more and more is excluded of the own context, weirdly. Attenberg is original, strange, brave, funny and even reflexive. The situations in the film may be presented in an unconventional way, but it's not hard to discover how universal they are. Marina (brilliantly interpreted by Ariane Labed) may not be the typical character, but see the her world from inside may be a very interesting experiences.

Difficult. That's what cult stands for in this situation. Greece's highest creations come from a group of people where they recycle and create via a type of rotation. The producer of Dogtooth become a director, the director an actor and so on. Not bad at all. Follows the artistic aspect of Dogtooth, showing a story on adulthood and dealing with loss and what you are. An unconventional human being (with a touch of Asperger's syndrome), a loving and caring father, a slutty best friend and a partner almost like an alter ego, resembles to her father, and mirrors herself. Honest, familiar yet artsy, method-ish and pretentious from time to time. But still opens up to the viewers, where the twisted is welcome, no one judges and offers himself to the public effortlessly, honestly almost unconditionally. A new era, post modern, unlocks the contemporary social establishment.

This film is complete and utter garbage. I found the underlying theme - that the character called Marina leads an isolated life and adopts the behavioural traits she observes on nature documentaries - tentative and completely implausible, particularly as we see on numerous occasions that she is not at all isolated. I was a huge fan of the equally quirky Dogtooth and comparisons are natural enough, but at least that film had an accessible and clear point, swimming as it was with lashings of the ludicrous and outre. But quite what the film-makers were trying to say here was completely lost to me; some interesting points are raised - the whole notion of death, the industrial history of Greece, sexual exploration and taboos - but none are properly developed. It just seems they were token efforts to give this exercise in absurdity some kind of meaning. They fail badly. Maybe i miss the point and the point is: there is no point - in which case why bother? Its not particularly entertaining, with the odd moments of black humour being far too sparse to make it worthwhile. The little dances between Marina and the other female lead were just too ridiculous to assert anything and didn't make me laugh, cry or think or feel anything. Even when the inevitable death of the father comes, little emotion is evoked, essentially because neither he or his daughter is particularly likable perhaps due to the over-the-top eccentricity they exhibit. I was quite glad when it was all over...neither as profound or challenging as i suspect was intended.

I saw this film at a KVIFF screening and just had to sit down and write this bit about it. I think I've seen quite a bit of various films, but this was a real "cinema extraordinaire"… Like Dogtooth, which Tsangari co-produced, Attenberg is a clear criticism of contemporary Greece and the decay of values on a sample so precious to the Greek culture – a family.Inspired by the BBC series studying the behavior of animals by David Attenborough, the film tries to do something similar, only the with people. Mispronunciation of the biologist's name provides the title to the film.The plot is quite simple and easy to get. Marina, a 23 year old is only just starting to experiment with her sexuality at the background of a deserted factory, a remnant of industrial Greece of the last century. Her father, who's dying of cancer, only speaks of the procedure of having his body cremated elsewhere, as this is apparently a taboo in Greece. Marina's experimenting her first sexual experience with her best friend Bella, who has apparently had her share already. Enter "Engineer", a nameless character, who serves Marina almost like a human figurine for her first sexual experience.Let the story begin. Hold on, but there's no story here. Tsangari is not interested in her characters and their journey of how they got being what they are or where they're going. Rather, she studies their character and she does so mercilessly.She doesn't stop before anything including stripping her characters (and their protagonists) naked, literary. Its not just their bodies we see naked, but also all their secret thoughts and feelings, lets them express everything on the screen for the voyeur-predator sitting in the audience, serving them blood-dripping raw.To even deepen the animal-like impression the audience gets when seeing the four lead characters, Tsangari lets them act like real animals, and uses these sequences as intermission, sort of, in her film, giving it an even more bizarre impression.The colors are very simple as well, the general greyness interrupted only by images of the monstrous factory nearby. Camera bets everything on stills having the pattern interrupted only by a moment when Marina and Bella play tennis and tensions between them escalate.Overall, a very interesting film more likely to shock and make your head spin rather than bore you.