Alps (15)

I saw Alps again this afternoon and find I was misled on Friday night by my own inattention and expectations of it. The rustling bag-bastard played her part, though. The story's marvellously well-worked and told; a horror-comedy of sickening sadness, even a thriller of sorts. At a lamentably gabby and vacuous Q&A (the interviewer more or less asked, "So ... where do you get your ideas from?" Horrendous.), the gracious director said the writers were aiming for originality. Originality as an ambition may never go down very well with the English; it went down badly with me, at the time. But I think they succeed. It does tell an unpredictable, original story with human hearted/minded substance in the whirl of disastrous transformations at the end. It baffled me at first but it's a very fine, funny, tough, clear film.

For the first half hour of this film I wondered if I needed new glasses, the picture looked so dark and dim. The flat lighting was a deliberate effect, but you'll need to stay alert if you're going to enjoy this one. Aggeliki Papoulia's performance as a woman obsessed with taking on the identities of dead people drives the whole film, but as a whole this film only really gets going halfway through.

I struggled to understand what was going on during the screening but it may be confusion is intended. The film opens with a young, female gymnast being threatened with a beating by her coach. The scene changes to a girl in an ambulance who's covered in blood. In fact, this is a different girl who's been in a car accident. The film does say that and may communicate everything else quite clearly but I struggled to follow at the time (distraction at the Renoir by a ferocious and sustained bit of bag rustling may have contributed). As far as I could tell, the actors performed impassively with their faces and voices beside a very occasional explosion. With the barrier of subtitles (reading not watching and unable to interpret vocal tone), I fell behind, confused. I think to a Greek-speaker, it's probably a much funnier (and maybe sadder) film than the house found it on Friday. Memorable and interesting but arid for me a first view.

Quite disappointed in this 3 star review, Alps is actually much better than Mr Jenkins suggests. Lanthimos pulls off the conjuring trick of making Alps simultaneously moving and tender, whilst also being hilariously, darkly comic, yet also oddly unnerving. The film is beautifully shot with odd framing and depth of field used to emphasise the characters skewed and blurred view on reality. The film proceeds at a slow, deliberate pace but is still mesmerising throughout. Very little explanation is supplied leaving plenty of space for interpretation and speculation about the ambiguous events on screen. A really beautiful piece of work.