Venice 2011: 'Alps' by Yorgos Lanthimos

Right after Andrea Arnold's take on Emily Brontë's gothic classic Wuthering Heights, Yorgos Lanthimo's fourth long feature Alps is probably the film I'm most looking forward to out of all the official entries at this year's Venice Film Festival, which is no trifle taking into account that the lineup of the competition strand alone includes films by David Cronenberg, Roman Polanski, Steve McQueen or Todd Solondz.

Some months ago, on the eve of the Academy Awards ceremony, I wrote here that Lanthimo's stupefying previous work Dogtooth should win the Oscar in the Best Foreign Film category. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I might choose Canada's more conventional but maybe more accomplished Incendies. Be that as it may, the prize finally went to Denmark's In A Better World, a respectable work, if inferior to those two other films.

My preference for the Greek movie was maybe due to the Oscar-prediction-frenzy context in which I wrote that post, a moment in which hasty evaluation usually takes precedence over thoughtful analysis. Or maybe I was simply overexcited about the fact that the otherwise predictable and conservative Academy had nominated a small Greek film that features explicit incestuous sex, domestic violence and feline mutilation.

I still think that Dogtooth is a remarkable film, regardless of the Oscar loss (believe it or not, Oscar losers appeal to me much more than the winners), and of its lurid nature. It owes a lot to Haneke's films (I guess Lanthimos watched Funny Games a couple of times) but it has a distinctive, disturbing quality in its own right. 

There is little doubt that Lanthimos and his clique are drawing up the birth certificate of a New Greek Cinema of sorts. Some weeks ago Greece announced that Dogtooth producer Athina Rachel Tsangari's Attenberg will be the country's official entry for this year's Oscar race. For all the aesthetic and thematic similarities with Dogtooth (or precisely because of that), I doubt that Attemberg, which has been produced by Lanthimos, can work the miracle again and get a second nod for Greece in two consecutive years. 

Tomorrow, Lanthimos's fourth long feature Alps will premiere at the Venice Film Festival. I refuse to comment or to try to make any sense of the official synopsis released together with the teaser trailer. Read it and judge by yourself:

A Nurse, a Paramedic, a Gymnast and her Coach have formed a service for hire. They stand in for dead people by appointment, hired by the relatives, friends, or colleagues of the deceased. The company is called Alps while their leader, the Paramedic, calls himself Mont Blanc. Although the Alps members operate under a discipline regime demanded by their leader, the Nurse doesn't...