The laughs sneak up on you in Alps
Starring: Aggeliki Papoulia, Ariane Labed, Aris Servetalis, Johnny
Vekris, Stavros Psyllakis Playing at: Cinema du parc Parents’ guide: nudity, sex,
language. Yorgos Lanthimos has chosen an appropriately abstract title for his odd film about a strange group of people offering a bizarre service to the bereaved.
Paired with his acclaimed 2009 film, Dogtooth, Alps further asserts the director as a bold voice on the frontier of boundary-pushing Greek cinema (alongside Alps coproducer Athina Rachel Tsangari, whose 2010 film, Attenberg, he and Alps actor Ariane Labed both appeared in).
Lanthimos’s tale revolves around four unlikely companions: a nurse, a paramedic, an amateur gymnast and her coach.
“Today is a special day,” reveals their self-appointed leader, the paramedic (Aris Servetalis). “I’ve thought of a name for our group: Alps.”
The name is perfect for two reasons, he continues. “One: It in no way reveals what we do. … Two: It has a symbolic meaning; Alps can’t be replaced by any other mountain.”
He names himself Mont Blanc, “the (Alps’s) highest mountain.”
It’s one of many ridiculous scenes in the film, all delivered in the most absolute deadpan — to the point where, at times, you may find yourself searching for the punchline. Fear not, Alps is often brutally funny, but the laughs sneak up on you, never spilling into farce and always tinged with gravitas.
Anchoring the performances is Aggeliki Papoulia, the rebel youth of Dogtooth. She plays the nurse with an impressive mix of naïveté, urgency and disaffection. When not tending to patients at the hospital or taking care of her father (or is he?), whom she lives with, she is roleplaying with company clients.
One day, she is the best friend of an elderly blind woman; another, she is a swimsuit-clad lover, conversing in broken English with a young man who owns a lighting store. But the lines between reality and fiction blur when she gets too close to a young patient at the hospital: a female tennis player, in critical condition after an accident.
Her subsequent actions find Papoulia’s character testing the limits of her freedom. Mont Blanc keeps his staff on a tight leash. His sidekick Matterhorn (Johnny Vekris) is the stern coach to Labed’s wistful gymnast, who wants nothing in the world more than the chance to practise her quaint rhythmic gymnastics routine to a modern pop song rather than tired old Carmina Burana.
Everyone is playing a part in Alps, and not only with the clientele. The women submit to the men’s rules, before deeper yearnings lead them to seek out alternatives. They fill in the missing pieces of other people’s lives; but what about their own?
As patterns emerge among the randomness, Alps the film begins to resemble Alps the company at its core. Lanthimos’s shrewdly constructed story riffs on conventional dramatic devices, recontextualizing them in ways that are alternately implausible, vaguely comforting and refreshingly provocative.
tdunlevy@ montrealgazette.com Twitter: @tchadunlevy