20130815: Comedy Review--Attenberg

Name: Attenberg (2010)
IMDb: link to Attenberg

Genres: Drama, Comedy, FeelBad    Country of origin: Greece


Cast: Ariana Labed as the protagonist Marina, Giorgos Lanthimos as the nameless Engineer,Vangelis Mourikis as Spyros, the ill architect father, and Evangelia Randou as the best friend Bella, who is warmer and more worldly than Marina.

Written and directed by: Athina Rachel Tsangari.

The Three Acts:

The initial tableaux: 

Marina lives in a small company town in Greece.  Marina generally does not like people, and she thinks her industrial town is boring.

Spyros, Marina's architect father, is dying of cancer.  Marina takes him to treatments and waits with him.

Spyros and Marina like David Attenborough's nature documentaries, especially the ones about mammalian behaviour.  That is part of the context of many of their conversations.  This is sometimes also true of Marina's many conversations with her friend Bella.

Delineation of conflicts: 

As Spyros' health fades, he has earnest conversations with Marina about the future.  Some of these are chewy, since neither party has been perfect.

Marina is a 23 year old virgin.  Bella tries to help ease her into experience with men. Marina's thorny personality makes this more difficult.

Marina is assigned to driving the Engineer around.  She decides that he is the one to help her end her virginity.  How well will that work out?

Resolution: 

Some of Marina's delayed coming of age issues are resolved.  Is she at a substantially different place at the end of the film?

One line summary: Life in small Greek company town.

Statistics:

Cinematography: 4/10 I saw this streamed in HD, but it looked like fuzzy video.

Sound: 5/10 Merely OK.

Acting: 4/10 Dead. Bang. Boring. However, I think the wretched acting was just what the director/screenwriter wanted.

Screenplay: 2/10 At least a third of this debacle was committed in silence.  I am most strongly reminded of 'performance art,' which entails a great deal of silence and lack of motion.  IMDb called it part of  'new wave Greek cinema.'

For some reason, hulu classified it as Comedy.  After watching the film I see that it was a comedy, as the director/screenwriter was laughing at the audience with every single frame. 

Final Rating: 2/10  The two points are for the many shots of the Greek countryside.