Director delights in new ways to tell tales
Yorgos Lanthimos leaves some work for audience
Yorgos Lanthimos doesn’t do things by the book; and it seems to be working for him.
The Greek director’s 2009 film, Dogtooth — a surreal black comedy about a family whose three adult children are taught strange meanings for everyday words and have never been allowed outside the immaculate compound where they live — won Cannes’s Prix Un Certain Regard and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
His new film, Alps, picks up where Dogtooth left off, taking us inside a makeshift company — whose employees include a gymnast, her coach, a nurse and a paramedic — offering a “substitution” service to replace lost relatives and loved ones. It won best screenplay at last year’s Venice International Film Festival.
Once again, Lanthimos creates a parallel universe that is at once absurd and disconcertingly real. Gender dynamics, threats of violence, role playing and nostalgia are central themes in a storyline that leaves you scratching your head much of the time before giving way to a surprisingly dramatic conclusion.
Lanthimos and actors Aggeliki Papoulia and Ariane Labed presented Alps at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, where they sat down with The Gazette to talk about expanding cinematic boundaries.
“I don’t think it’s non-narrative,” Lanthimos said, when asked about his unconventional storytelling style. “It’s not very well-defined by what you have come to expect in terms of evolution of action and feelings, but it is narrative. It’s scenes in continuation, that lead somewhere; from that aspect, it’s completely narrative.
“I don’t want to be too literal about the way I shoot a film. I don’t want to explain everything and show every little detail and force people to a very specific feeling or thought. I want to let them be free to engage with the film, make up their own minds about things and wonder what exactly is happening in this scene.”
The movie begins with a halfhearted rhythmic gymnastics routine by Labed (none of the main characters have names, though some take on pseudonyms), twirling a ribbon in an empty gym to the tune of Carl Orff ’s Carmina Burana, while her coach looks on.
“What’s the problem?” he asks, after.
“You know,” she retorts. “Why can’t we use a pop song?”
Her wish consumes her throughout the film. Meanwhile, Papoulia (who also starred in Dogtooth) plays a nurse who locates people with dead relatives or lovers who the company can approach to offer its service, wherein members go to their homes and (monotonously) act out the parts of lost ones.
Much of the dialogue is delivered in a deadpan style that imbues even the most mundane situations with twisted humour and a sense of something else going on beneath the surface.
“I like a scene to breathe, to be able to go in different directions so you don’t know how you should feel,” Lanthimos said. “I think that’s the tone in at least my last couple of films. It’s this thing which is funny, but tragic and sometimes violent.”
An early scene finds the paramedic asking a mangled ambulance victim for the name of her favourite actor. Later, Papoulia’s nurse despondently engages in a lover’s quarrel with a customer, in awkward English.
“If you think about it, most of this dialogue is almost transcribed from reality,” Lanthimos said. “That is how it becomes absurd. It’s literally what people say. If you put it in a different moment and (context), it becomes absurd. … When you put people in extreme conditions, and have them speak or act completely realistically, it becomes absurd if they’re cool about this extreme thing that’s going on.”
Key to Lanthimos’s esthetic is the underplaying of emotion. By sapping his scenes of traditional dramatic signifiers, he achieves a heightened realism of a different kind — which, he argues, is more real than most of what comes out of Hollywood.
“I find traditional (acting) performances very unrealistic,” he said. “I find them very theatrical, melodramatic, very fake. Sometimes I enjoy a performance by Daniel Day Lewis, let’s say. I might even be moved by how good it is. But it’s a completely different thing. It’s a performance. I try to have people in my films be more real as a presence than a performance.”
Papoulia and Labed, who both come from Athens’s experimental theatre scene, lauded the unique environment Lanthimos creates, and the room he gives them to explore hidden sides of their characters.
“He has a strange way that he puts you into what he wants you to do, without discussing or analyzing things,” Papoulia said. “He lets you be there, and he creates situations for the actors to be in the moment and react to one another.”
“We have it as a golden rule that we will not try to find the background for the character,” said Labed, who won best actress at the 2010 Venice Film Festival for her role in Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg. “It’s more (about) acting, reacting, games and trusting the mood he creates on set. … It’s very different, but very exciting.” tdunlevy@montrealgazette.com
Twitter: @tchadunlevy