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Chris Cabin Beloved by Ebert. full bio of Chris Cabin Somewhere towards the midpoint of Athina Rachel Tsangari's quite promising debut, Attenberg, it becomes clear that the ambiguous stigmas that dictate the odd behavior of twenty-something taxi driver Marina (Ariane Labed) also dictate the aesthetic, if not the emotional core, of Tsangari's film. Standing on a rooftop in a small town in Viotia, Greece, whipped by gusts of wind, Marina admits an affinity for uniformity to her ailing father (Vangelis Mourikis), and Tsangari, working with the talented cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis, composes shots in neat, tidy assemblages of uniform lines, shapes and materials; pretty cages for her performers to pace, pose, converse, and lash out in.
What exactly the purpose or the thrust of the peculiar actions Marina, her father, and her best friend, Bella (Evangelia Randou), indulge in remains pretty vague and mysterious, but then the film fosters a fascination with deconstructing and reconstructing familiarity. The story, though filmed as an odd, incremental progression towards death, change, and modernity, is essentially plotted like a petrified melodrama about a woman's sexual and societal awakening on the eve of her father's death. The start of a love affair with a nameless engineer, played by Dogtooth director Giorgos Lanthimos, is simple and quasi-convincing but her intimate encounters with him unfold like experiments or etiquette lessons. Girl time with Bella includes kissing lessons, off-kilter musical numbers, and wild, animalistic gesticulations. Even the film's title, a mispronunciation of Sir David Attenborough's last name, initially sounds geographical in nature.
To be fair, the admirable strangeness of Attenberg isn't completely unfamiliar. Lanthimos's aforementioned debut is an obvious kindred work, and there are more than a few shots that recall R.W. Fassbinder, perhaps the greatest stylist and devout agent of narrative defamiliarization; at least one shot seems to be lifted directly from Katzelmacher. But this is not to say that Attenberg is substantially derivative or irrelevant. Though it doesn't directly confront Greece's recent economic and social turmoil -- it opened in Greece towards the end of 2010 -- there is an uneasy dread that can be heard in the Tsangari's script, when Marina's father speaks of the sudden shift from agriculture to industrial works in the country, and it can be seen in the long tracking shots of industrial plants that stand like doomed kingdoms on the outer rim of Marina's town.It would be an outrageous overstatement to call Attenberg prophetic or even precocious, but under the grimy industrial thump of Suicide's "Bebop Kid" and "Ghost Rider," there is a rare feeling of making grave amends, succumbing to some dark, decaying finale. Towards the end of the film, talk turns towards Marina's father's wish to be cremated, a procedure that was forbidden in Greece (until recently) and therefore required bodies be shipped internationally for the cremation to take place. There is at once a resistance and a shrug of inevitability towards the mechanical and, by extension, digital ages in Attenberg, and the fact that it was shot on 35mm only sweetens the pot. Perpetually off-balance and maybe just a little too satisfied with its cynicism, Attenberg is nevertheless one of the most bizarre and bizarrely becalmed end-times flicks to ever see stateside release.
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