by STEVE ROSS
Are the brilliantly strange films of Yorgos Lanthimos and Athina Rachel Tsangari a product of Greece’s economic turmoil? And will they continue to make films in the troubled country?
It must be the worst kiss in screen history. Two young women face each other in front of a white wall. They crane their necks, lock lips and awkwardly flex their jaws. There’s no hint of passion. They look more like two birds trying to feed each other. After an excruciating minute of this, they pause. One of them says she feels like throwing up. They clumsily rub their tongues together a little more, only to end up spitting at each other, then blowing raspberries, before hissing at each other like cats.
Attenberg, by Greek director Athina Rachel Tsangari, doesn’t get much more normal from there on in. Its heroine, Marina, is a 23-year-old outsider who’s largely disgusted by the idea of human contact. She’s also close to her dying father, whom she talks to about imagining him naked “but without a penis”. Other pastimes include the music of Suicide and the documentaries of David Attenborough. If she sounds like a kooky indie romcom cypher in the Zooey Deschanel mould, she’s the exact opposite. Like the film around her, Marina is defiantly eccentric but also intelligent, sensitive and somehow rational.
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