Movie Review: Greek Film Alps Is Strange, Befuddling, Impossible ...

Alps, the latest film from Academy Award-nominated Greek director Giorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth), is a parable of estrangement, submerged in the director?s characteristic Brechtian?Verfremdungseffekt, the camera and characters obscured in a difficult and alienating pictorial world. Aggeliki Papoulia plays a member of a small team that calls themselves ?Alps,? and they offer a strange service to people who are grieving the loss of a loved one: pay-for role play. Each character takes on the part of a deceased lover or family member, acting out staged scenes seemingly to fill the void or the silence that accentuates the onset of grief.

Lanthimos?s films deliberately subvert dramatic and emotional feeling, creating anti-melodramas that are nonetheless caught up in a profoundly devastating dramatic arc. We never really get to know anyone as we are used to ?knowing? characters in cinema; instead each personae operates in a world that is robotic and oppressive. There is an undertone of physical and emotional abuse. The two males in the foursome that make up ?Alps? are chauvinistic, brutal, and totalitarian. The women are strangely obsessive about their desire to dissolve their identity in their fictional personae, and as the film progresses, it becomes clearer that they themselves are lost to the layering of roles and role playing.

What is remarkable about Lanthimos? films is that even though they are structured to alienate the audience from the characters and their world, there is a slow erosion of feeling that takes place as a result of his deliberate and lumbering style. Shots are excruciatingly long, as are the many uncomfortable settings, and humor is achieved through a recognition of the pure absurdity of the drama. In one scene, Papoulia?s character acts out a scene with a man in which she pretends to break up with him and move to Toronto, over and over. The scene is in English, and the language is stilted and insufferably staged. It is impossible not to laugh, but there is something truly gut-wrenching and surprisingly honest about it all.

There is a temptation when writing about Greek art to carelessly toss around the word ?tragedy,? but with Lanthimos there seems to be a working through of the structure and effect of tragedy, mingled with a very modern approach to obscuring pathos. It makes for a very difficult movie (and a number of people worked out of the screening I attended at the Dallas International Film Festival where it played earlier this year), but if you give yourself over to Lanthimos, you can?t help but find yourself deeply affected by a palpable and true-feeling desperation.

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Source: http://frontrow.dmagazine.com/2012/08/movie-review-greek-film-alps-is-strange-befuddling-impossible-and-brilliant/

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