DANCING
THEIR DREAMS TO THE GROUND
by
Douglas Messerli
Giorgos
Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou (screenplay), Giorgos Lanthimos (director) Άλπεις
(The Alps) / 2011, USA 2012
For
several years now the Greek film director Giorgos Lanthimos has been creating a
series of dystopias, visions of society created by those in power or others
outside and hidden from the general society that may be seen by their creators
as different kinds of utopias—a world wherein a family’s children are sheltered
and protected from the perceived excesses and breakdowns of the general society
(Dogtooth); a society in which all beings find perfect mates who deeply
share their interests and patterns of behavior (The Lobster); or where a
woman who has literally served as a dress designer’s model and has been
somewhat psychologically “made over” by him can turn the tables, so to speak,
helping to transform not only the balance of power between them, but to help
him discover new ways of living (The Favorite).
The trouble with all of these seemingly
utopian visions has long been perceived: when people in power or who are
secretly enacting their imaginary transformations of others, they generally do
not take into account the true feelings and emotional well-being of those for
whom they seek “better” lives; and their own attempts to enforce the betterment
of the society around them is quickly perverted by their own misconceptions,
psychological quirks, and failures to emotionally respond. In order to keep
their children locked away in the paradise they imagine their have created, the
parents of Dogtooth must lie and pervert natural desires, even going as
far as to create false languages so that their children cannot even interpret
the would outside of their domain; the dictators of the world requiring people
to find their perfect companions mistakenly assume that love is determined by
similarities instead of differences, or even more wrongly assume that marriage
is the central defining joy of life; the former model who would achieve some
level of control over her dominating lover’s life can do so only by serving him
poisonous mushrooms that temporarily endanger his life by creating nausea and
fever.
Lanthimos' 2011
work, also part of this series, deals more with a somewhat hidden team of
would-be do-gooders. The group, which during the course of the film come to
call themselves The Alps, have taken on the cause of helping people whose loved
ones have recently died by “replacing” themselves as the daughters, sons,
husbands, wives, and other relatives who people have recently lost.
For a small
fee, they learn of the habits, conversations, and friendly sexual relationships
of the recently departed beings, parroting them back, generally without
emotion, to family and friends. Often, they play out, again and again, over
days, dramatic moments in the beloved dead ones’ lives: the discovery, in one
case, of a young girl in bed with her new boyfriend, a sexual liaison a dead
man had with a wife who was about to leave him forever, etc.
The well-meaning goal of these seeming
therapy encounters is to help the grieved more quickly come to terms with their
loved ones’ deaths. It never seems to strike the doctors, nurses, coaches, and
others who play out these charades that by extending the relationships beyond
death they may be, in fact, refusing the important process of forgetting, of
letting those who have disappeared from their family’s lives go more quietly
into death.
Moreover, what the director shows us
behind the scenes of this group is their own personal demons intruding into the
lives of the dead ones and their families. As Roger Ebert correctly observed in
his September 2012 review:
Not
a single person in the film points out the absurdity
of
its [the Alps’] premise. We don't get to know the clients
very well, but we watch the Alps members as
they train in
an
empty gymnasium. In particular, we follow a gymnast
(Ariane
Labed) and her trainer (Johnny Vekris), as they
work
on a routine involving her dancing with a long ribbon
fluttering
at the end of a baton.
She does this (very well) to classical
music, but when
she asks to change to pop music, he tells her
he will bash
in
her face if she questions his authority. We find it is
no
idle threat. This brutal relationship has no apparent
connection
with the grief therapy of the Alps, which
otherwise
consists largely of memorizing dialogue.
Need one mention that the Alps themselves
are not so mentally stable? Later in the film the gymnast, convinced that she
will never be allowed to dance to pop songs, attempts to commit suicide. Her
friend, who has taken the moniker of Monte Rosa (Aggeliki Papoulia), a nurse in
this group,
attempts to convince her trainer to allow her to perform to
something other than classical music, which he agrees to—but at a cost. The
nurse must carefully trim his hair before having sex.
Indeed, Monte Rosa seems to be required to participate and sometimes refrained from engaging in sexual activities, including with
clients. At other times team members are punished by the leader, Mont Blanc, for
the smallest of infractions, including drinking from or allowing others to
drink from each of their assigned coffee mugs.
Monte Rosa becomes the center of
Lanthimos’ drama, moreover, when she becomes infatuated with a dying tennis
player (Maria Kirozi) brought to her hospital in serious condition, apparently
from a car accident. At first she attempts to convince both the girl’s parents
and the patient that she is getting better.
In fact, the idea of taking on “private
clients” is totally antithetical to the Alps’ methods, and surely is one of the
multitudinous rules that control their players’ lives.
Yet,
the nurse goes even further, inviting the former tennis player’s young
boyfriend to her house, where they have sex, Monte Rosa announcing to her
elderly father that he is her new boyfriend.
Predictably, Mont Blanc follows her to the
tennis player’s family home, later suggesting a heavy baton with an apparent
light at the top will define her punishment for breaking the rules, which will
mean her ouster from the organization if the light turns red.
There obviously is no light at the top,
and redness of which he speaks is created only when he smashes the object into
her eye, around which she herself must later sew stitches to prevent infection
and help it to heal.
Now nearly completely ostracized from the
tight society she previously inhabited, she then shows up at the dance club her
father attends, grabbing the woman with whom she has seen him dance as her
partner and, in surely one the strangest dance scenes ever performed on screen,
quite literally draging the woman through a kind of deathly tango, finally
depositing her on the floor.
A final attempt to regain entry to the
tennis player’s home duing which she breaks through the patio window before she is
escorted out by the girl’s father, ends with a protective barrier rolled down so that she
can no longer ever again enter her strange vision of a paradise—a home and life
which she apparently never had of her own.
The gymnast, meanwhile, has brilliantly
come alive in her new role of dancing to pop music. Even her trainer seems
utterly pleased with her performance; but we recognize by the somewhat
salacious grin on his face, that her future with the Alps will surely cost her
something which she may not yet be ready to pay.
The trouble with utopias is that they are
inevitably imagined by human beings, earthly beasts who are all so terribly
flawed.
Los
Angeles, July 31, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (July 2020).
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