Alps (2011)

I'm amazed this film was so similar to the bizarre yet alluring debut feature by Giorgos Lanthimos, "Dogtooth".

Its for this reason that it really bombs in my opinion. The concept of the story, the stylisation, shooting, the dry emotionless delivery of the characters, the sex acts, the violence, the patriarchal characters within it, the submissive female characters, the fact he is using one of the same lead actors, etc etc.

I could go on. The film is just too similar to Dogtooth in every way. And if your going to make such a stylised film similarity stands out even more I feel.

This is Dogtooth but just less alluring. OK, maybe its just a more obfuscated story and one that is more challenging it could be argued. Still when you've seen the previous film this seems like a weak tweaking of the same formula.

If you haven't seen Dogtooth go see it! I recommend it. If you do by chance see this before Dogtooth maybe you can pass it off as interesting and at least very unique, however it's hard to think this with the knowledge of what came before it.

I really hope Giorgos Lanthimos can develop a lot for a 3rd feature and dig himself out of the stylistic hole he seems to have dug.

Fmovies: Giorgos Lanthimos wowed critics with his somewhat entertaining freakshow Dogtooth a while back. This is his follow-up, and it represents all of the aspects of Dogtooth I hated and had none of the (very minor) strengths. It is, first and foremost, an enormous bore. The actual content of the film is negligible and it's absolutely full of pregnant pauses and unnecessary bits. What content there is is awful. It's a film about people who do things that real people would never do and acting ways people would never act. I frankly just don't see the point in any of this. The story revolves around a group of people (calling themselves the Alps) who will, for a fee, take the place of deceased loved ones. Like Dogtooth, there's a lot of nudity and humiliating sex, but there's nothing salacious or shocking here. It's all very clinical. About the only good thing I can say about the film is that Lanthimos definitely has a good eye for visuals. Really, though, I'd rate this as the worst movie I've seen from 2012 so far.

Much of the enjoyment of viewing the work of director-writer Yorgos Lanthimos and co-writer Efthymis Filippou, for me at least, is in trying to figure out what's going on, so I'd recommend seeing them, "Alps" included, before reading reviews such as this one. The four movies of theirs that I've seen thus far (which also includes "Dogtooth" (2009), "The Lobster" (2015) and "The Killing of a Sacred Deer" (2017)) all seem to exist in alternate realities and forgo much of the sort of exposition that makes most movies easily accessible. Moreover, the characteristic affectless acting from the duo's oeuvre dissuades the spectator from identifying with the characters, and the editing and compositions often obfuscate more than they elaborate on happenings. Distant shots remove more than they reveal and close-ups conceal rather than involve.

I suspect many are confused by searching for meaning in these movies, and that that's why so many strain to apply some social commentary to them. I think that's off-base, and if that were their raison d'être, I would've already abandoned them. Perhaps, they do reflect our society--our world in some ways, but I don't find that appealing; more so, I consider them self-reflexive of their own storytelling--of the art of cinema. This is especially the case with the filmmakers' two earlier Greek productions, this and "Dogtooth." In the prior one, the characters were confined by a fabricated narrative--metaphorically and literally held captive within a movie--with that world, rather paradoxically, upset and expanded by VHS tapes of movies. "Alps" is the inverse of this, with characters desperately and intentionally trying to shrink their world into fabricated narratives and using qualities of cinema (performance and storytelling) to do so, to metaphorically enter the movie. Here, the main characters are actors, who employ a stiff or deadpan style, to replace dead people in the lives of the deceased's family and friends, who themselves become both actors and spectators to the fabrications of their own lives, equated to cinema as they are. To do so, the actors largely rely upon questions involving favorite performers: movie stars and musical pop sensations, particularly.

The actors proclaim themselves the "Alps," because that mountain range can replace any other (as they do with the dead), they say, and the name doesn't specifically describe them (their identities outside of acting largely being a moot point, anyways). As actors, they inhabit different narratives within the overall arch that is the movie, with the stories becoming crisscrossed for everyone: characters and the spectator. Meanwhile, there are other forms of performance, as well: dance, including the gymnastics routines, sex and violence. The only deadly sin for the Alps is to fall out of character. Without their characters and their narratives--without the performance, they perish.

Alps fmovies. Does it matter what ties a group committed to a common goal together? Does it matter if their common passion is nefarious or altruistic? Do the members need strict unbreakable rules to cohere? Is the survival of the group more important than the survival of any member? Can a goal of the group be accomplished by an individual without the support of the group?

Lanthimos has my unreserved admiration. I assume he is looking at group dynamics perverted. I can't quite relate to this movie as recognizably human.

I had visceral understanding of Dogtooth. This is what we do as parents.

I had visceral understanding of The Lobster. This is what society demands of us.

No such connection to Alps.

Two years after his international hit «Kynodontas», Yorgos Lanthimos released «Alpeis», which is as good as the previous, winning the Best Screenplay award at the Venezia film festival, as well as other distinctions in Sydney and Sofia. However the film was unjustly appreciated: as people say, "comparisons are unfair" and the reception of «Alpeis» proves it, as audiences and film critics were expecting another portrait of canine confinement. This time the filmmaker opted for theatricality, games of appearance and perception, he opted for a tale that fluctuates between drama and comedy, inclined to the absurdist aspects in the representation of reality. «Alpeis» is more realistic than its predecessor, but not because of this it lacks images expressing "artistic flights". On the other hand, Lanthimos touches death, a subject that frequently frightens people, when it is one of the few things we humans can have for sure. The story though does not present descriptions of demises, but a group called "Alpeis" that offers a peculiar service to mourners: a temporary substitute for the deceased, with a fixed fee, while the grievers adapt to the loss of their loved ones. Their varied clientèle includes the parents of a young tennis player, a blind and cuckolded old lady, a local man that communicates in English, a naval officer… At the same time the same personnel conforms a small group of gymnasts and trainers that gather in a sports hall. However the plot is built around a young nurse (played by splendid Angeliki Papoulia, who was the older sister in «Kynodontas»), her tribulations and twisting. The social and economic crisis of the country does not have a central place in Yorgos Lanthimos' cinema, as in the movies of other of his compatriots, but for the stories he tells Lanthimos vividly suggests that something is rotten in the state of Greece.

A KVIFF screening, from the young and talented Greek director Giorgos Lanthimos, a follow-up of DOGTOOTH (2009), which was a dark horse nominee of Oscar's BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM OF THE YEAR and I haven't watched yet. But Giorgos' eerie approach of scrutinizing modern-day's communicative malaise has its overt justification in ALPS.

Absurd, genuinely designed, full of fits of laughters about the mimicking set pieces, the film presents itself in a more comprehensive elaboration than I expected, although initially, it takes some time to figure out the real occupation and motivation behind the self-dubbed "Alps"group (maybe Everest could be a more befitting name since its the highest mountain on the earth and its irreplaceability should be more cogent than Alps as long as height is concerned).

But the wacky "impersonating the deceased"groundwork is not potent enough to sustain the film into a genius employment, since the demanding of this type of service and its viability to perform its presumed obligation (to console the next-of-kins' grief) is a moot question here, and eventually a win-win condition has to yield to the conceptual willfulness (in the film it is the identity misconception, a spontaneously unsurprising aftermath). But performance-wise, leading actress Aggeliki Papoulia is a natural treasure, rendering the eccentric antics much more personal dedication (which also includes an equivocal default of the relationship between her and her father, another Alps' case or not?), I put her among my top 10 list of BEST LEADING ACTRESS line-up of 2011.

ALPS is a patchwork piece, nonetheless, Giorgos' one-of-a-kind singularity alone could be singled out as one of the most intriguing and cutting-edge film artist to bring some mondo gratification to cinema nerds.