[PLEASE, stop adding irrelevant shit or promotional scum for your blogs to this still. watch the film, instead.]
it's NOT a FUCKIN' romantic movie.
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Alps [Yorgos Lanthimos, 2011]
As the pictures of a party where everyone is drunk and wild sometimes reveal a fatal truth in the corner of the frame, so the cinema of Lanthimos – with its jokes, mechanical gestures and paradoxes (the general fixation on the name of the favorite actor, dialogues that don't match facial expressions) - despite the apparent quirks, describes the contemporary world. Emphasis is prohibited (the incipit with Carmina Burana) because in everyday life there is no pathos, there is only the consolation of laughter on the surface (the ending with a cover of Popcorn by Gershon Kingsley).
"Alps" is the name that a Paramedic (Aris Servitalis, a psychotic little man cut to be a leader) chooses for a sort of improvised theater company. Its members are the Coach (Johnny Vekris - a sadist disguised as an old neighborhood bully), the Gymnast (the amazing Ariane Labed, a nervous pawn in his hands, emotional on the inside but wearing the armor of an emotionless puppet - she had already starred in Attenberg, which is almost the twin movie to Alps) and the Nurse (an equally amazing Aggeliki Papoulia from Kynodontas).
The lot is hired to temporarily fill the physical space that the death of someone has left in a family, playing scripts that are basically the same cheap performances that one requests from a whore, only instead of the classic "undress and touch yourself", we have the "bite your nails" of a father who's trying to bring his little daughter, the sixteen-year-old tennis player, back from the dead.
We feel the absence of those we miss through trifles, tiny things that used to generate conflict (finding one's daughter in her room with a boy, or one's best friend in bed with one's husband), or through comforting habits (the same barber for a lifetime, the one who can trim the sideburns perfectly). Then we are struck by a certain bewilderment: what if the physical contact with a body so different from the one we knew, with a face and a voice so clearly unlike, ends up seeming more real to us precisely through the simulation?
The Nurse plays a dead lover, of which she must simulate the pleasure and the questionable romance-novel remarks. And yet, after a while, her voice really breaks... "When all the senses are synchronized, the soul emerges. It was to be expected." concluded Bioy Casares in The Invention of Morel. Here, Alps at least has the gift of bringing back the personal obsessions of those on the other side of the screen, and here is mine: faithful reproduction, recording, appearance: is it really possible to distinguish them from an original? Perhaps what some like to call soul is nothing more than the projection at repeated intervals of a perfume, a voice, a way of moving the head, a laugh, a particle of heat, concludes the islander of Morel, forever lost in Faustine's vision.
Money isn’t the only motive: Lanthimos is way more cynical than that. In the first half of the film we start suspecting that his style is becoming too scheming and dry, but in the second half he shows the horrifying nature of the world in which we live, in all its brutality. For the Nurse (and probably also for the other Alps members) these performances are the only way to fill a void and when they are rejected, they show the dirty face of addiction (real addiction) the explosion of such powerful loneliness that it can only be filled by becoming someone else, anyone else. In a chilling progression, the Nurse, like a virus, tries to enter any life, tries to be whatever - the dead girlfriend in the car, her own mother, the elderly dance partner and the lover of her father - provided that the father we saw her looking after is actually her father and not another client, in a game of cruel traps…
The smile of the Gymnast in the ending, when she finally got her pop song to train on: one might argue that she is a kind of Pinocchio turned into a real child, and she is repeating her puppet line "you are the best coach in the world", but finally, with an expressiveness, with a sincere impulse of joy. But her slightly crazy smile could simply be the best of her interpretations: the Gymnast who for a moment saw herself take shape, from a hologram to become invincible, tangible, earthly. Imagine the feeling: finally, to exist! A particularly interesting simulation, because the Gymnast is performing a performance for herself. A particularly painful illusion, because will end up in the next piece in which she does not recognize herself and becomes transparent again. But until when? In focus, out of focus...
humor & thanatos
