Athina Rachel Tsangari
Attenberg

Attenberg is set in a post-modern Greece, grey except for the sea. Marina, the protagonist, is 23 years old and a virgin. She has a more experienced best friend and a sick father. The dynamics that bind Marina and Bella are not new to contemporary cinema: Marina feels hatred and envy towards Bella because she admires and despises her at the same time. She believes Bella is flirting with her father. The initial kiss between the two, long and self-satisfied in highlighting the barbaric movement of their tongues, intertwining, wrapping, retracting, and reuniting mechanically, is the first of a long series of skits that dot the film. The style is undoubtedly minimalist, conversations reduced to the bone, and the camera lingers, as in the finale, on the urban landscape, which acts as an aid to the sparse words of the protagonists. But the words spoken are beautiful: the dialogues between father and daughter, and the father's monologue in front of the sea about the state of the nation. However, the father is a sad, dull character, destined to die as modernity advances and sweeps him away, because he is incapable of dreaming, of even believing; an atheist architect, who believes in nothing but loves his daughter, who in turn tries to alleviate his pain as she can, for example, by making him an aloe cream (one of those little things that embellish the narrative fabric of the film). Attenberg has much in common with two other films of the new Greek cinema: Kynodontas and "Miss Violence." With the former, it also shares the director, Lanthimos, here an actor playing the foreigner with whom Marina loses her virginity in the hotel room where he sleeps. With these, besides the style and aesthetics, it shares the way its characters act, who seem like actors on a theatrical stage grotesquely mimicking reality, as when Marina and the father pretend to be animals, and Marina and Bella pretend to be two felines, and also in the skits where the two dance together, just like the two sisters in Kynodontas in their domestic performances and the younger daughter in Miss Violence when she danced for her father. Their feline behavior remains always, like that of two snakes ready to bite each other to avoid being bitten first. 'You don't like women,' 'You don't like women either,' they throw at each other, and their words sound like hisses. But despite this, the feelings seep through the grey coating like drops of steam fogging up the lens through which we watch the film. The hotel rooms and the hospital rooms, which make up a good part of the used settings, are muffled echo chambers for the smallest gestures of affection, the neon lights the spotlights for love scenes. Here, too, the characters have problems expressing their feelings, blocked by taboos, as they were by family education and the marginalization they were subjected to in the two previous films. Here the situation is seemingly different but remains fundamentally the same, and Marina is initially the victim, but she then emancipates herself through the discovery of sex and processing the pain of grief. In a way, what Attenberg offers if not a happy ending is a non-negative ending, which canonically is nothing but the end of the coming-of-age period.