Alpeis
Yorgos Lanthimos (2011)
The world in Dogtooth, while real for the grown-up children imprisoned in it by their father, was aberrant and pathological in relation to the larger world outside it. In his new film, Yorgos Lanthimos creates another kind of make-believe – this time in the public world and, not only for that reason, less hard to reject as a perverted distortion of reality. A group of four people – two men, two women – bring relief to the recently bereaved by ‘substituting’ for their lost loved ones, imitating the conversation, interests, opinions and other characteristics of the deceased. The quartet call themselves ‘the Alps’ and each takes the name of a particular mountain: Mont Blanc, the harshly domineering leader of the group, explains that the Alps, as a mountain range, can replace any other range but nothing can replace the Alps (whatever that means). I thought Lanthimos made a few logical mistakes in Dogtooth but the universe that he created was detailed and compelling to visit. The big idea in Alps seems, on paper, to have satirical comedy potential – on the extent to which we see even those closest to us as our possessions and, to that extent, perhaps not irreplaceable. The problem is – and it’s soon obvious this is a problem – that Lanthimos is either unable or unwilling to dramatise the motives of the bereaved in engaging the Alps. A couple whose daughter – a keen tennis player – has died in a road accident are shadowy, emotionless figures. When Monte Rosa pretends to be their daughter, the camera is close up on her face; the faces of the parents are out of focus in the background of the shot. Of course Lanthimos is free to decide what he does and doesn’t want to concentrate on but it’s unsatisfying that he builds his film on an extraordinary premise that turns out to be the hook on which to hang a story which, for all the unusual style of Alps, is a more familiar one.
One of the questions the Alps routinely ask of potential clients – or of the about-to-die loved ones of potential clients – is who their favourite actor was. (The answer is always an American or, in one case (Jude Law), a British male.) Films about successful actors, whether real or fictional, conventionally describe how the actor is able to bring other people to life but unable to get her or his own life in order. Alps turns out to be a peculiar variation on this theme. Monte Rosa lives with her recently widowed father. The climax of the film sees her violently dispatched from the Alps (with a brutal assault on her that’s uncomfortably reminiscent of an episode in Dogtooth); then, under feeble cover of the technique that she’s used with other clients, trying to replace her dead mother by making sexual overtures to her father (he reciprocates by slapping her face and telling her to get lost). Monte Rosa is increasingly the main focus of Alps and, as suggested above, of Lanthimos’s camera. Aggeliki Papoulia (the elder daughter in Dogtooth) is an evidently committed actress but the character is too obviously conceived for her to be able to sustain much interest in Monte Rosa. The close-ups of Papoulia make it clear from the start that Alps is going to be about Rosa’s feelings rather than those of the people she’s ostensibly helping, and Lanthimos develops her story in ways that are occasionally startling but which contain no real surprises.
Monte Rosa works as a nurse in the same hospital where one of the other Alps (Aris Servetalis) is a paramedic. These seem appropriate jobs for their choice of second career but the other two Alps are a rhythmic gymnast (Ariane Labed) and her tyrant coach, Mont Blanc (Johnny Vekris). The film begins with the gymnast begging the coach to let her perform a routine to a pop track. This coach-pupil relationship is less obviously connected to the substitute theme than is Monte Rosa’s story; indeed, the gymnast, who’s younger than Rosa, has hardly any bereaved clients that we see. At the start, the coach threatens the gymnast with a beating, which he eventually administers to Monte Rosa instead. Impersonating the teenage tennis player, Rosa is asked by her parents to bite her nails; a few screen minutes later, we see the gymnast doing the same. The trajectories of the two women change when the gymnast tries to hang herself; Rosa saves her and tells the coach that she (Rosa) will do anything if he’ll let the gymnast do a routine with a pop track. I’m not sure what these resonances – and the theme of male hypocrisy and exploitative cruelty that runs through the movie – add up to. (Mont Blanc objects strongly to the idea of the female Alps having sex with clients but takes a different view when he’s a participant.) Alps has a happy ending of sorts. Instead of Carmina Burana, the gymnast performs to Hot Butter’s ‘Popcorn’.
18 November 2012
