Dad, Meet Human nature

Attenberg, a delightfully frustrating father-and-daughter love story comes by way of Greece, from the minds of the people that gave us one of my favourite movies from last year, Dogtooth. Now if you read the first sentence carefully, alarm bells may well have gone off: yes, this is a father-and-daughter love story, but not in a psychoanalytic, deeply incestuous kind of way (as if Ian McEwan had written it). Rather, Attenberg is very playful – the characters like to play (the two lead female characters perform regular dance routines on the pavement); the film plays with the viewer (who has no idea what to expect from what they’re viewing – no instant gratification here!); the film plays with itself (what is shown or not shown; lingering shots of factories...). 

Yet Attenberg is a film to take seriously, for within all of this playfulness, Greece is falling apart, and her subjects want to know: did you not see this coming? How are we to survive? The relationship between Marina (Ariane Labed) and her father (Vangelis Mourikis), slowly dying from cancer, is sensitively handled. One scene has the father looking down at their town from a height, from where he speaks to Marina about Greece and her being. The two spend much time together watching television on a bed (now, now, none of that). Here the film obtains its title: Attenberg is a playful mispronunciation of “Attenborough”, as in sir David Attenborough the esteemed British scientist. It’s one thing to see these characters watch a documentary on animal behaviour; it’s something else to see them imitate this behaviour.

Such are the idiosyncrasies of Athina Rachel Tsangari’s film, which seems to be set in the town where Dogtooth’s patriarch runs a factory, thus inhabiting the same slightly otherworldly reality as George Lanthimos’s film. Lanthimos, by the way, co-stars as a man who may become Marina’s first real lover, if one discounts the lessons provided by her friend (Evangelia Randou), who involves Marina in some lesbian moments that cannot be called 'lesbian' because a framework of 'lesbianism' cannot be applied to the film. 

Attenberg is consistently eccentric but there’s something missing, preventing the film from being Dogtooth’s equal. It might be that while Dogtooth sucked you into its world with its particular rules and regulations, Attenberg gives you a lot of themes and quirkiness from the get go, creating too much distance between viewer and film. A certain sensitive playfulness gets you some way, but Attenberg is too ‘unbound’, too decentred, to be anything more than a delightfully frustrating companion piece to Dogtooth.