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*This post discusses plot details of Dogtooth (2009) and Attenberg (2010)*
If you�ve checked the news in the past� three years or so, you�ve probably noticed that Greece is in the process of collapsing. They haven�t quite reached the point of full-blown, irreversible cataclysm yet, but give them time; it would seem that Chancellor Merkel derives some sort of sick pleasure with prolonging the suffering of the Greeks, like a cat with a half-dead mouse, or a psychopathic child with a half-dead cat.
Now, I�ve seen very few Greek films (three, to be exact), but they�ve all conveyed to me in various ways that Greek society�with all that entails, socially, economically, politically�is grievously ill, in the same sense that a Dostoevsky novel shows us that the Petersburg society of Prince Myshkin is grievously ill. This is personal angst writ large as societal anomie (I feel like I used a very similar line in some other recent blog post, but so be it).
The first Greek movie I ever saw was Yorgos Lanthimos�s Dogtooth (2009), which tells the story of a nuclear family in modern-day Greece which has raised its children in complete isolation from the outside world. So the children, who are now either in their late teens or early twenties, have been fed a diet of family myths, weird mystifications, and surrealistic lies. They believe that Frank Sinatra was their grandfather, that cats are dangerous monsters, and that the word �zombie� refers to yellow flowers. The characters in this film descend into incest and brutal violence, but Dogtooth avoids Haneke-esque joylessness by pervading its atrocities with a sense of whimsy that the dour Austrian would never attempt.
Now, I approach works of art as art, first and foremost, and I�m loath to draw sweeping political and cultural generalizations based on, say, a film. To say that Greece is fucked up based on Dogtoothwould be like watching a Woody Allen movie and concluding that all Americans are neurotic Jewish comedians from New York (sigh, if only we were). The problem for a country like Greece is that we see relatively few cinematic representations of it, and so, when a Greek film does makes it way to the U.S. (be it in some kind of limited theatrical release or�more likely�on Netflix or MUBI or Fandor), it carries more representative weight than an American movie would. The world is flooded with American movies, and mediocre though most of them are, they display enough diversity that a person wouldn�t need to settle on one American film and draw from it sweeping conclusions about the U.S., unless that person were a �cultural studies� major, in which case it would be incumbent upon them to draw sweeping conclusions from that film�s representations of race, class, sexuality, and gender.
But we�re digressing, and I wanted to confine this to a mere series of �notes.� Well, now, the second Greek movie I saw was Debtocracy (2011), a documentary about the Greek financial crisis which quite rightly slams all the usual suspects, Goldman Sachs, the IMF, and the flaws inherent in the euro and its disadvantages for a �peripheral� European country. The film goes on to discuss the concept of �odious debt,� by which a country seeks to repudiate a debt that wasn�t contracted in its interests, under open and democratic circumstances, and free from corruption. The concept, which has been bandied about by left-wingers in places like Haiti and Ecuador, was actually first pioneered by the imperialist United States which would nowadays scoff at the notion; but in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, the US thought it advisable to free its new client state�Cuba�of the debts it had incurred under Spanish rule. Those debts were not incurred with the consent of the people and they were not in the interests of the people. Similarly, a large portion of the modern-day Greek debt was incurred by the shady machinations of the corrupt and incompetent political parties which have historically taken turns governing post-military junta Greece: New Democracy on the center right and PASOK (the socialists) on the center left. Yes, I say the socialists are center left, because once you embrace crippling austerity measures at the request of your neoliberal overlords at the IMF, then I�m sorry, but you�re no longer a genuine lefty.
So where Dogtoothdepicted a world symptomatic of Greek societal decay, Debtocracyexplains it quite explicitly, blow-by-blow. Tonight I watched 2010�s Attenberg, which is certainly the most subtle of the three Greek films under discussion here, and now I can get around to my Attenberg notes:
Attenberg is about a young woman (Marina), her best friend (Bella), and her father (Spyros). Now, I�m not a doctor or a mental health practitioner, but if I were to diagnose Marina with a disorder, it would be Asperger�s syndrome. Her speech patterns are idiosyncratic, at times ritualistic, and often affectless. She doesn�t like to be touched by other people, and Bella and her father are her only friends.
Bella doesn�t seem to have any other friends either, although she has sex partners, and many of them, we�re led to believe. The film opens with strange scene of Bella and Marina attempting to make out, for educational purposes, and with Bella as the instructor, of course. Marina goes at it with mouth gaping open and tongue stuck out rigidly; if the tongue�s role in a French kiss is typically to caress (I think that�s the best way to describe it? The partners� tongues caressing each other?), then Marina looks like she�s trying to stab someone with hers (think of Anna Karina�s demonstration of how to kiss in Godard�s Band of Outsiders). So anyway, this sets up our first plot strand, which we can call �Marina�s Sexual Education.�
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| Bella and Marina "making out." |
The second plot strand could be called, �Oh God, Marina�s Father is Dying,� because Marina�s father is dying. They never name the ailment, but we see him in the hospital, hooked up to IV�s, undergoing various tests. Marina�s mother is dead and she and her father get on very well. They have a shared love of David Attenborough�s wildlife documentaries. Or perhaps, Marina loves them, and the father watches them because he loves Marina. The film gets its title from a scene in which Bella refers to Marina�s �Attenberg movies,� and Marina corrects her, with a hint of a British accent, �Sir David Attenborough,� so that it sounds like �Attenburrall.�
Back to the dying father: he gets all the lines which establish this film�s topicality. He gets to hold forth on the state of Greece. Apparently he�s an architect, and while surveying the crisp, antiseptic white buildings that dominate the landscape, he says, �It�s as if we were designing ruins.� He also has a great line where he says, �I�m boycotting the twentieth century.� He adds to this that he is leaving his daughter in the twenty-first century, and that he has no advice to impart to her on the subject.
Marina�s relationship with Bella is strange; it is difficult to see what either woman get out of it. They frequently engage in strange, ritualistic �dance� movements together, which echo the impersonation of animals that Marina and her father can be seen to engage in after watching an Attenborough documentary. Maybe Marina isn�t autistic; maybe everyone she knows is just as strange and isolated as she is, and this is how they �deal� with it.
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| Bella and Marina "dancing." |
I don�t know how I would deal with the economic catastrophe if I was living in Greece now. What does one do in such a situation? The institutions of power seem to be beyond one�s grasp. They can�t even get an anti-bailout coalition in Parliament, despite the fact that the majority of Greeks keep voting for anti-bailout parties (too many parties, that�s the problem). And if they can�t influence Parliament, then they certainly can�t influence Berlin and Brussels. Who knows, maybe Francois Hollande will sweep in with his staggering charisma and save the day?
Haha, ah, we do like to kid around here at the Say a Prayer for the Octopus blog. I�ve said what I wanted to say about Attenbergfor the time being. Or, I mostly have. I don�t think I explicitly rendered a critical judgment on it yet, but an explicit judgment would be something along the lines of �it was good� or �it was beautiful,� and I�d prefer to think that the aspects of the film that I�ve highlighted are enough to indicate how I experienced the film.
Meh, why not, this one time, just come out and say it was �good?� For the Greeks! So go out and get yourselves a copy of Attenberg. Maybe even buy a copy, and buy it now, thusly injecting a few euros into their economy before they switch back to the drachma and the whole new drama of �capital flight� unfolds.
