Lee Eisenberg Athina Rachel Tsangari's "Attenberg" doesn't present the most positive image of Greece. The focus is a pair of friends in a mining town. The main girl is watching her father die, and her only real pleasure is watching David Attenborough's wildlife documentaries, in addition to the sex education given to her by her friend.The movie itself was pretty slow and seemed to have little other purpose except to show these girls in a grim existence. But at the same time it gives one a sense of life in the Hellenic Republic. Once the land that gave the world philosophy, it's now the Third World of Europe. The historic sites are surrounded by crumbling sidewalks and people missing teeth. It's no accident that Greece has been probably the single country most affected by Europe's economic mess. As the main girl's father puts it: "We went from sheep to bulldozers." Anyway, it's not any kind of great movie, but it does give one an idea of the status quo in Greece.

kyanberu I liked this film, but only after making the following assumptions about what director Maria Tsangari was trying to do: (I) Depict current post-Christian Greece as an emotionally dead society that had failed to develop properly as had the rest of Europe (hence the need for cremation in Germany, music from France). (II) Make Marina the symbol for Modern Greece. She is devoid of human feeling, and yet the only character who really matters. Her architect father is dying. Her engineer lover is an automaton. And I think Bella does not really exist, but is Marina's alter ego--the real human Marina would like to be (this would explain their synchronized dancing and Marina's request that Bella sleep with her father). (III) Show humans as little different from the gorillas seen on Sir David Attenborough's BBC show. The naked and semi-naked women parading around the changing room could have been a scene from an Attenborough nature documentary. When Marina and her lover were bouncing on the bed like gorillas they were making a conscious attempt to go back to their roots; to escape the emotional sterility of modern Greece.It is a movie of beautiful, haunting tableaux. The closing scene of trucks rolling though the industrial landscape after the ashes of its architect were scattered in the nearby sea shows that life on earth goes on, regardless.

hanagomolakova I saw this film at a KVIFF screening and just had to sit down and write this bit about it. I think I've seen quite a bit of various films, but this was a real "cinema extraordinaire"… Like Dogtooth, which Tsangari co-produced, Attenberg is a clear criticism of contemporary Greece and the decay of values on a sample so precious to the Greek culture – a family.Inspired by the BBC series studying the behavior of animals by David Attenborough, the film tries to do something similar, only the with people. Mispronunciation of the biologist's name provides the title to the film.The plot is quite simple and easy to get. Marina, a 23 year old is only just starting to experiment with her sexuality at the background of a deserted factory, a remnant of industrial Greece of the last century. Her father, who's dying of cancer, only speaks of the procedure of having his body cremated elsewhere, as this is apparently a taboo in Greece. Marina's experimenting her first sexual experience with her best friend Bella, who has apparently had her share already. Enter "Engineer", a nameless character, who serves Marina almost like a human figurine for her first sexual experience.Let the story begin. Hold on, but there's no story here. Tsangari is not interested in her characters and their journey of how they got being what they are or where they're going. Rather, she studies their character and she does so mercilessly.She doesn't stop before anything including stripping her characters (and their protagonists) naked, literary. Its not just their bodies we see naked, but also all their secret thoughts and feelings, lets them express everything on the screen for the voyeur-predator sitting in the audience, serving them blood-dripping raw.To even deepen the animal-like impression the audience gets when seeing the four lead characters, Tsangari lets them act like real animals, and uses these sequences as intermission, sort of, in her film, giving it an even more bizarre impression.The colors are very simple as well, the general greyness interrupted only by images of the monstrous factory nearby. Camera bets everything on stills having the pattern interrupted only by a moment when Marina and Bella play tennis and tensions between them escalate.Overall, a very interesting film more likely to shock and make your head spin rather than bore you.

stensson 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.