La vida según Attenberg

23 year old Marina (Ariane Labed) has a best and only friend Bella (Evangelia Randou) living in a small Greek seaside town. She has a job driving a visiting engineer around for the big factory. Her dad is dying and she's growing out of her shell.

It's a cold deadpan delivery from everybody. Starting from the awkward opening scene where the two women try tongue kissing, this is an experimental film bent on provoking something from the audience. However the one emotion provoked in me is boredom. That's even true for the weird dance number. The monotone style really wore me out. Ariane seems like a compelling actress. Her story with the father has good potential. I just got bored waiting for things to happen.

Dark, unpleasant movie about contemporary Greece, set by a dying father and a lost-soul daughter. Strange how you can fall in love with an actress you haven't seen before, as I did with Ariane Labed playing Marina. I guess she reminded me both physically and spiritually of an ex-girlfriend. Attractive, somehow boyish, always making the other move, both at a distance and now and then unexpectedly intimate. All the talking in other reviews about Marina being emotionally 'dead' is total nonsense. You have to (try to) understand this character, but not many men are willing or able to. To me she was the shining light in this portrayal of a depressed, bankrupt and humiliated country. This movie worked like a magnet to me. After I finished watching it, I was almost certain the director had to be a woman of about my age. I was right. I suppose Ariane has a great filming future ahead of her, but I hope she will perform in movies like this one. But it could just as well be her best role already.

According to one of the main characters, Greece is a country which has moved from keeping sheep to IT, without passing industrialism. And this is not the Greece you see in postcards. It's post modernism in an ugly shape, the remains of an overrated 20th century.

One of the girls here is 23 years old and has always rejected both sex and love. Her female friend is on the other hand very experienced. Their relationship is somewhat cold, although finds expression in their dancing together in a yard.

A father and architect dies, not any longer believing in his 1900s. The 23-year-old girl almost talks a relation with a man into pieces. This is a form experiment, but it's not that successful. But it very much rejects that old bad century.

Wihtout much info regarding the writer/director or a film presentation it's hard to solve the puzzle of what I've just watched (I have Chevalier in my watchlist: good reason to watch it sooner than later).

While I'm not sure if Attenberg is about human ethology, about a father-daughter bond, about Greece, industrial districts, young women, modern relationships or modern relationships of Greek young women in industrial districts...

OR simply autobiographical...

While I'm not sure of any of these, I can say that Attenberg is a pleasing and powerful watch.

I recently saw this at the 2012 Palm Springs International Film Festival. Marina (Ariane Labed) is a sexually inexperienced 23 year old who lives with her dying architect father Spyros (Vangelis Mourilas) in a Greek mining town. She shares her existence with her best and only friend Bella (Evangelina Randou) and for some unexplained reason they enjoy holding arms and doing silly walks together. Bella also brushes Marina up on the art of kissing. Bella works in a diner while Marina also has a job but we never really learn what she does. Marina's father is dying and she takes him to and from doctors appointments and the clinic and they eventually live together in a motel room close to the hospital. Marina and her father like to watch David Attenbourough nature documentaries where she and her father mimic the animals featured in them. She mispronounces Attenbourough's name as Attenberg, thus the name of the film. Marina finds a boyfriend in an engineer (Giorgios Lanthimos whom she does not want to share with Bella. Athima Rachel Tsangari directs this original story written by her. Not much of a story here. Not much of a film here either. Good soundtrack to this film with music by Suicide, François Hardy, Daniel Johnston, J.J. Johnson's Beboppers and Marilena Orfanu. Lanthimos who plays Marina's boyfriend is best know as the director of the critically acclaimed film Dogtooth. Attenberg is Greece's official submission for consideration as Best Foreign Language Film to this years Academy Awards. Surely there were better films to come out of Greece so why they chose this one perplexes me. I would give this a 5.0 out of 10.