gmbcorp today: New Directors/New Films 2011: Critic's Notebook

New Directors/New Films 2011: Critic's Notebook

by Vadim Rizov

At Ellen's Age (Im Alter Von Ellen), concerning a flight attendant who freaks out and quits as the plane prepares for takeoff, premiered at the Locarno Film Festival days before JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater famously told off a rude passenger, opened the emergency landing door, and slid away from his job. Slater now lives as a low-tier quasi-reality star, making minor celebrity appearances and milking TMZ coverage while working on a book. (He shares an agent with Barry Manilow.) Flight attendant Ellen's (Jeanne Balibar) dramatic exit here takes her in a more meaningful direction, from neurotic, directionless woman to committed animal rights activist.

Like its protagonist, German filmmaker Pia Marais' comedy morphs twice. At first, it's a jittery portrait of rigorously put-together Ellen. Post-Dardennes tics of European filmmaking persist: the aggressive handheld camera prowling behind Ellen's head as she strides through anonymous airports is familiar, as are her relationship struggles with Florian (Georg Friedrich), which she responds to by smoking and brooding in the night. On board, Ellen goes woozy delivering the standard pre-flight instructions about oxygen masks. The sound gets thicker, the lighting slightly dimmer and more ominous and Ellen gets out of there.

There's an anti-climactic interview with the supervisors (she's summarily fired after listlessly asking to keep her job), some ennui-ridden hotel room moping, and finally a tumble into a totally different movie about animal rights activists. No longer a strict Euro-moper, Ellen becomes almost totally passive and happily non-responsive, wandering around like Wiley Wiggins in Waking Life, willing to listen to anyone talk about whatever. Her new young friends practice communal living, with daily meetings and endless strategy consultations: very '60s holdover. Brittle bourgeois Ellen responds to her new locale well. "I've never been around such idealism before," she tells her adoptees at a party.

Despite their stale rhetoric (like the 12 Monkeys gang, it's not clear what they're going to do with all the animals they free), the kids prove good company. One helps Ellen get rid of the increasingly annoying Florian by pretending to be her new partner. When Florian shows up asking Ellen to reconsider living with him, his girlfriend and his child, the young romantic tells him "That's some outmoded '60s thinking, it won't work" while rolling up a joint, without apparent irony. With Florian gone, Ellen can examine her new life: having receded to something like a supporting character in her own film, she begins wondering what she can do to help people and/or animals, perhaps not in that order.

Best not to spoil that last part of the film, which changes styles and location one more time. What you get up to that point is a neat trick: an elliptical portrait of a female midlife crisis in which the scenes where she turns catatonic are dramatically filled in by those around her, allowing for a scrupulously real-feeling collection of bratty dreadlocked girls and chain-smoking comrades arguing over their next political gesture. By giving Ellen the chance to change her life in unexpected ways, At Ellen's Age transforms dramatically, opening with generic Europe airports and ending somewhere in the jungle, as complete a makeover as Ellen's.

Attenberg costars Dogtooth writer-director Giorgos Lanthimos and is written and directed by his associate producer Athena Rachel Tsangari, making comparisons unavoidable, especially in its intro: a prolonged shot of a badly painted wall in close-up, held indefinitely just because, recalling Lanthimos' fearsomely controlled and systematically oblique movie. Two girls enter and begin, in the most uninflected dialogue imaginable, a kissing lesson. Marina (Ariane Lebed) opens her mouth like a fish, like she's never seen humans do this before. Attenberg

Her more experienced friend Bella (Evangelia Randou) lectures her on the necessity of saliva and gives her a two-finger measurement of how much to keep her mouth open. All this is very reminiscent of Dogtooth's abused children, locked up by bizarrely hermetic parents who purposefully riddle their vocabulary with misdefined words.

Despite an initially unnervingly close (but generally innocuous) relationship with her terminally ill father Spyros (Vangelis Mourikis), Marina can navigate the real world in many respects: her job involves a lot of driving, and she knows how to use a moped. She's a decent tennis player and has a deep love for the music of Suicide. (At one point she calls foosball "babifoot," but since that's her only inexplicable verbal lapse that seems to an in-joke.) As far as real live human models go, though, all she has is Bella and her dad, who's prone to bitterly allegorical speeches about how Greece skipped the Industrial Age.

Writer-director Athena Rachel Tsangari works in a different mode from Dogtooth, a highly-directed, slickly widescreen piece of tableaux cinema. Attenberg is 1.85, shot on grainy 16mm and roams all over its small Greek town, rather than sticking to a family compound. Marina can act downright autistic, narrating her first sexual encounter in real time, but she's determined to acquire "normal" human behavior patterns (rather than the animals of the Sir David Attenborough nature documentaries she loves to mimic). For her, that means methodically identifying what about her demeanor and urges is relatively sound, and which parts of her personality have yet to be discovered. That means, generally, investigating sex and friendship, which Bella understands abstractly but has no visceral feeling for.

Because Marina has to grow, Attenberg flirts with sentimentality, which isn't a huge sin. More problematic are its occasional lapses into the generic language of Euro art-house: certain shots (opening and closing, natch) seem to be held after no one's onscreen without particular reason, mostly as a catch-all signifier of rigorous filmmaking. Your mileage may vary on the many, many shots of Marina and Bella performing little choreographed silly walk/dance sequences, which are funny and unnerving until they begin to serve more as run-time padding. It's hard sometimes not to wonder why every character talks robotically, making the formerly deadpan likes of Stranger Than Paradise seem full of frantic mugging and broad jokes by comparison. Despite those detractions, Attenberg is a portrait of a hard-fought coming-of-age in a carefully-shot town whose waterfront and gas stations get equal screen time.

There are more serious reasons to be doubtful about Summer of Goliath (Verano De Goliat). Director Nicolas Pereda brings the rigor to small villages and offers meandering anti-narratives respectful of his modest surroundings, the unprepossessing people who live in poverty, etc. If you follow festival-circuit coverage, you'll want to see this no matter what. Not unenjoyable but nonetheless deeply frustrating, Goliath suggests art cinema is reinforcing new clich�s on a highbrow level.

Here, there's a shot you can see everywhere from Lisandro Alonso's Los Muertos to Casey Affleck's I'm Not There of someone slowly wading through a river, a signifier of thought and real-time change that should be given a rest. (Judging by his Dante references in interviews, Affleck was aiming for the same tier of self-conscious seriousness) The way violence is treated is annoying as well. In one of the best scenes, two young military camo-sporting types use the ongoing threat of drug cartel wars to scare the hell out of an old man taking a rural stroll (he comes to the country to get away from Mexico City, which the dirt-poor youth resent). Summer of Goliath

Later, someone or something gets kicked and beaten up hard, but it's all filmed out of focus, a coy ambiguity serving nothing, really, but budget expenses. Violence here is a "specter," but it doesn't have weight: it's implied, but never felt.

Nonetheless, Pereda's still shy of 30, and he's a good student of these kinds of festival films. Shooting in HD with colors tweaked closer to Tony Scott's token cross-processing than you'd expect, Pereda shoots with actors who seem like non-professionals. Whenever people go walking?long tracking shots from behind to keep up, naturally?he tends to loosen up. The two military-minded young men are pretty terrible as human beings, but at least they're funny in their goonishness. There's an overarching thesis here, explicitly reiterated in the dialogue: what does Mexican Masculinity mean? Is it having a job and supporting your family, as one man insists? Is it possibly just tired homophobia, casually dropped at regular intervals? Pereda has a firmer handle on his subject matter than his mode of inquiry, but when he lets people converge in groups or take a stroll, the tone gets less didactic and (for whatever coincidental reason) the film becomes prettier. As in all three films, relaxing control can work wonders.

[The Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA's "New Directors/New Films" series screens through April 3. For more info, visit the site.]