Review of Attenberg

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.