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.

Family values, lies and a cat

At least there's no severed ear

"Dogtooth", by Greek filmmaker Giorgos Lanthimos, gives us one of the most dysfunctional families I've ever seen on screen. The film started out as frustrating and pretentious, but the minimalist imagery won me over eventually and I was riveted. Unencumbered by traditional notions of setting, plot and context, Lanthimos presents us with a family trapped in a bizarre capsule-like existence. Here, when an airplane flies overhead, the mother throws a toy plane from behind a shrub and then watches the three children - all moving through or beyond their teenage years - fight for ownership of the fallen object.


Forgive me, for I think I've just given something away; not a plot twist or anything that changes one's perception of the film, but how the film plays with the viewer, keeping you in the dark on how exactly the family works. Some things are hinted at through the film and then unexpectedly a flashback (which is not signaled as a flashback) appears to clarify what's going on. It's in this that the domestic cat gains great significance, and I will say no more on the matter. The mother teaches the children language and vocabulary that fail to correspond to what we know about the words used to signify things. A daughter asks for the phone while seated at the dinner table, and the mother hands her what we'd refer to as "salt". If language constructs reality, then take a deep breath.    

Oh, the story. Best to keep it simple. An upper middle class family - mother, father, two daughters and a son, who's the oldest - live in a house that seems to be geographically isolated from the rest of the world. They could be anywhere. There's nothing concrete or manifest to keep everyone inside, but the children have been told from very young that they cannot exit the gate or a dark fate will befall them (or something like that). So, they don't leave the premises. The mother and father are perfectly aware of what they are doing, and while mom stays home, dad goes out every morning to the factory he owns (he has to fund the fantasy somehow).

How can he leave home while the children cannot? He does so in a car. Such is the logic of the world constructed and controlled by the parents. Even sexual behaviour is controlled; if the son cannot find a suitable woman to relieve his needs, why, he has two sisters, hasn't he?  

"Dogtooth" excels at alienation. The family imposes some sense of exile, while the film's language - static lingering shots, limited editing - avoids an emotional connection to any character. Nothing is sensationalised; we are simply shown what happens through a detached lens. Lanthimos does not give us a single character to align with; one character that does serve as a kind of entry point into this bizarre setup has her own needs, desires and whatnot to tend to, and does not stay very long. Much like the children, we are trapped in the movie with people we do not know, and we don't necessarily want to be there.

The film is the opposite of escapism. By showing us a world constructed around the avoidance of life as we know it, we are forced to reflect on what we know, especially about family dynamics. Power shifts from father to mother and back; theirs seems to be a functional partnership, with added sexual benefits. Somewhat surprisingly, there is a narrative turning point in the film. At the same time, it is exactly what we expect and not at all what we expect. This turning point even feeds into an ambiguous climactic moment, with a final shot suggesting that Schrodinger was right.

The film may be ambiguous about a lot of things, but it's far from inaccessible. There's no palm-to-the-head viewer reaction suggesting a eureka-like realisation, or a complete failure. On its own terms, within its own world, the film makes perfect sense. We've never seen a family drama like this.

Did I mention the cat?