Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg (2010) begins with a transgressive scene. Two young women stand face to face against a white wall. They open their mouths unnaturally wide and press their tongues together, probing deeper and more dramatically as they go. This exercise quickly devolves into bizarre horseplay, and soon they are wrestling each other to the ground. Beyond being very funny, this sequence introduces the viewer to a way of seeing. By abstracting the simplest of acts (a kiss), Tsangari forces us to ask what is a kiss and what are just two mouths being pressed together. This calculated alienation persists throughout the film, making Attenberg hard to pin down.
Ariane Labed stars as Marina, a misanthropic 23-year-old who spends her time caring for her dying father (Vangelis Mourikis) and hanging out with her friend Bella (Evangelia Randou). She likes listening to Suicide and watching the documentaries of David Attenborough. She’s never had sex and only ever (clumsily) practiced kissing with Bella. She begins to ferry a visiting engineer (Yorgos Lanthimos) around the barren Greek town where she lives and the two slowly develop a sexual relationship. Meanwhile, she and her father are planning to have his body shipped abroad after death to be cremated, something that is illegal in Greece. There is a sense that Marina hopes to treat the world around her as clinically as do the Attenborough documentaries she loves, but feelings prove to be pesky things, and as her desire grows so does her grief and anger over the impending loss of her father.
Attenberg’s eerily banal mingling of sex, death, and freakish spontaneity creates an obliqueness that allows it to circumvent conventional sentiment in favor of something new. This newness is a contemporary understanding of the world, one that is not despairing in its atheism, but sensitive, amused, and alive. Rather than flattening reality with prescriptive emotional and dramatic normativity, Attenberg offers moments of deadpan comedy, haunting landscape photography, a variety of absurd non sequiturs, frank sexuality, cultural critique, and touching human warmth. These seemingly disparate, sometimes challenging motifs add up to a materialist vision of life, and the mercurial feelings that animate it, in all its glorious and bittersweet weirdness.
Attenberg screens tonight, July 19, at the Museum of Modern Art in 35mm as part of the series “A View from the Vaults 2023: Films in 16 and 35mm.”
