Guest review - ATTENBERG

This review is brought to you my guest reviewer, Karan Aurora:

Athina Rachel Tsangari's Attenberg is a curious little film. For its brief running time it completely busies itself with chronicling a brief period in the life of Marina (Ariane Labed). She is a 23 year old girl who lives in an anonymous town in Greece nestled in a quiet valley with its own bay, a big industrial plant on its outskirts and a whole lot of white little matchbox houses joined neatly by perpendicular pavements and roads. One of the architects who worked building this little industrial town is Marina's father who is now dying of a terminal illness and his daughter remains his sole support. Marina, previously disinterested in guys and all things romantic is also seen starting to explore her sexuality and has started to date a guy from the town. When not shuttling her dad in and out of hospital or taking newbies around town, she is seen spending most of her leisure time either watching David Attenborough's wildlife documentaries (the film gets its title from her erroneous pronunciation of his surname) or indulging in synchronised randomness with her best friend: from time to time the film cuts to these two girls dressed in identical costumes walking step in step and doing choreographed runs down their favourite back alley. 

There is much that perplexed me about Attenberg but probably the most was Tsangari's insufferable need to underline the quirks of the protagonist (quite like my paragraph above) to the point that it came across as patronizing and slightly voyeuristic. After the fourth time a mellow moment or a contemplative conversation is intercut with two minutes of Marina's silly walk with her friend any mood and atmosphere conjured with meticulous detail by Tsangari (whitewashed interiors, gloomy grey skies, rain spattered windows and generally a pallette sucked of all colour) completely evaporates. It might be just for effect or relief or a way for a deeply conflicted Marina channelling her rage, but being jolted time and again when you are busy trying to invest in the movie's characters and the context here gets rather irksome. There are countless such instances where you see Tsangari squealing Weird Small Town People from the way she emphasises odd things in her shots and reduces her people to tics and fixations. Very briefly though, she manages to get it all right, invests some care and makes it all flow. And it works. Like how from out-of-the-blue her main characters suddenly launch into an impromptu play-fight where they mimic gestures and calls of animals they so religiously watch in Attenborough's documentaries. But outside these choice moments, the film struggles to hang together.    

I also did not particularly revel in having Marina as a protagonist. Besides being crowded with quirks and typical teenage curiosities that she feels the urge to vocalise all at once, she is given an emotional range of a toothpick. Nothing much has ever caught her fancy and frankly, she couldn't care less. On the surface, she might wonder about her "alternate" ideas about sex, relationships and how she is "above it" and "does not see the fuss about love, guys, intercourse" etc, but give her some alone time and her affectations and concerns are as twee as any teenage girl next door. Ironically even at her most subversive, like with her friend doing their dancing and singing and spitting as a twosome, she is stilted and as later revealed, incapable of empathy. Oscillating between being passive aggressive and ambivalent, there is little coherence to her actions or thoughts for the people around her and Tsangari's opaque film offers very little in terms of both explanation and warmth.

Without any emotional connect then, watching Attenberg purely at an intellectual level also proves underwhelming at best. If there was any anthropological insight into this "abandoned small town phenomenon" where people who are reared up without much stimulation and exposure from further ashore and who are not being bombarded with expected and accepted societal schemas and behaviours from the internet, TV, radio etc then grow up to be such emotionally sterile dispassionate zombies then it is (thankfully) cancelled out by the three thanklessly written functional supporting characters who surround Marina.  

Some of the inorganic elements are beautifully filmed here, like the long takes of the alumina refinery in the end credits or the water movements of garden sprinklers in the start credits but the directness and clarity with which Tsangari starts with her people in this film is never really followed upon. You do take some moments home like a father regretfully looking down from a tall terrace on the ugly town he helped form or on being asked a suitable music for her father's funeral service the girl asking if bebop is an option, but overall you come out of the cinema slightly amused but totally unmoved and unconvinced.

ATTENBERG played Venice where actress Ariane Lebed won the Volpi Cup and writer-director Athina Rachel Tsangari wo the Lina Mangaicapre Award. It also played Toronto 2010 and Sundance 2011.  It opened in 2010 in Greece and earlier this year in Austria, the Netherlands, Sweden and Estonia. It is currently on release in the UK and Denmark. It opens on September 21st in France.

Late Review by A.H. - SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK (2008)

Everyone is disappointing the more you know them.

By turns comic and poignant, the maze of love, and of the memory of love, and the idiosyncratic forms that maze takes, has been a motif of the writer Charlie Kaufman’s recent work. And yet the maze of SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK – in contrast to his previous doubling rabbit-holes – is neither internal, nor scrambled through; rather it is a large-scale theatre, a simulacrum of the city of New York, where director Caden Cotard (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) meticulously puts on, observes, and so re-experiences the daily troubles and past disappointments in his relationships with his wives and lovers. That the protagonist is an artist considering his time with the women around him may be a nod to the familiar – but it is in the effect of this life-long, theatrical, melancholic project that the film becomes a remarkable and ambitious variation in Kaufman’s characteristically unique design.

From the opening of the film, Cotard is, as his name suggests, preoccupied with the approach of death and the disintegration of his body, which only seems to widen the tense distance between himself and his wife. He directs a successful production of Death of a Salesman, and is subsequently awarded a MacArthur Fellowship that gives him the funds to create his immense life-theatre in a disused airplane hangar. This time of achievement in his professional life is weighted by his increasingly failing health (an unending anxiety seems to surface in pustules, disturbing shakes, problems in bed), and his complex personal life, marked by absence and regret and obsession, which in turn, Escher-like, becomes material for his grand play.

Kaufman has always drawn skewed perspective brilliantly, particularly in highlighting the difference in perception within relationships, and he continues this trick in SYNECDOCHE. When Cotard’s first wife Adele (Catherine Keener), a painter, declines an invitation to attend a performance of one of her husband’s plays because she must spend time packing up her canvases for an exhibition abroad, there is a hilarious cut to a shot of her canvases in their boxes – she paints on the most miniscule of scales and the crates she uses resemble matchboxes she could pack in a few minutes. Similarly, when Cotard discovers, to his horror, that his daughter from his first marriage has become a tattooed celebrity at the age of ten, his second wife Claire (Michelle Williams) exclaims that everyone has tattoos and turns her back to lift up her shirt revealing an enormous, monstrous tattoo of her own – which Cotard then denies having ever seen.

Keener and Williams are faultless in these roles, as the rest of the cast generally tend to be whenever they are on screen. That cast includes Samantha Morton; Jennifer Jason Leigh; Hope Davis; Emily Watson; Dianne Weist; and it feels important to name the soaring ensemble here as they are each gone too swiftly. But that, achingly, is the nature of the piece. As the play comes to its end, so Kaufman’s questions become plain: where does love go? Where does life go? Their ethereal conclusion is one of the many ways this film rewards watching and, of course, re-watching.

SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK played Cannes (where it was beaten to the Palme D'Or by GOMORRAH), Toronto, Chicago and London 2008. It won the award for Best First Feature and the Robert Altman Award at the Independent Spirit Awards in 2009. It went on limited release in 2008 and 2009, and is now available to rent and own.

London Film Fest 2010 Day 14 - SURVIVING LIFE (THEORY AND PRACTICE) / PREZIT SVUK ZIVOT (TEORIE A PRAXE)

SURVIVING LIFE is a classic Svan Jankmajer film: animation interspersed with live footage to create a surreal vision of life - at once a Kafka-esque nightmare, and very, very, funny! In this particular flick, Eugene is a middle-aged, happily married man, who has a surreal dream about a young, beautiful, sexy woman in red (Klára Issová). In his waking life he tries all manner of old-wives tales to recreate that dream, and even resorts to psychotherapy to find herself again. The problem is that the psychotherapist is basically using techniques that answer what the dream is really about and so eliminate it. All under the mocking gaze of portraits of Jung and Freud who alternatively laugh, roll their eyes and applaud.

SURVIVING LIFE is witty, funny, imaginative, surreal but also somehow authentic in how it portrays the way in which we can still be bowled over by a crush way past our teenage years. I really believed that Eugene was captivated by his lady in red, but also that he was a decent guy. And even though Czech art-house animation might not leap out at you, I would encourage anyone who wants a more sophisticated version of a rom-com, with a light touch of the Terry Gilliams, to check this out.

SURVIVING LIFE played Venice and will be released in the Czech Republic on November 4th 2010.