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| Papoulia performs a service in Lanthimos' Alps |
««« Alps. Written and directed by Giorgos Lanthimos & Efthymis
Filippou. Directed by Giorgos Lanthimos. Coming soon to Netflix.
In some cultures it is
customary to hire professional mourners at funerals. Nor is it unusual for
living people to personify the dead in certain ceremonies, such as ritual dances.
But Giorgos Lanthimos’ Alps takes the
whole “playing the dead guy” idea to an interesting extreme. In the script by
Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou, a secretive business hires people out to take the place of the deceased for customers who have lost relatives. In a decaying
economy such as Greece’s, it’s an unlikely but brilliant idea: a service job as
recession-proof as death itself.
The company calls itself the "Alps” because, as leader
“Mt. Blanc” (Aris Servetalis)
explains, the Alps are the archetypal mountain range, impressive enough to
“stand in” for any other (this is nonsense, of course). But Blanc’s stable of
impersonators indeed have the skills to play anybody’s dead wife, husband,
daughter or son. And Lanthimos’ movie has a tone that is strange enough to
perfectly match its premise.
The ace of Blanc’s staff is Monte Rosa
(Aggeliki Papoulia), a hospital orderly who confidently steps into the shoes of
the wife of a lighting salesman. But her skill at shedding and taking on other
identities has a cost, as she becomes obsessed with a teenage tennis player who
dies after a car accident. She takes on the role of the dead girl on a
freelance basis, not telling the strict (and occasionally violent) Blanc about
the job. Her deep devotion to her work—call it “extreme impersonation”—becomes
a problem in itself, as Rosa’s desire to resurrect the dead comes to overshadow
her duty to assuage the family’s grief.
In tone, Alps resembles
some of Werner Herzog’s early films, such as Heart
of Glass (1976), where all the actors were filmed in a
state of hypnosis. Papoulia, in particular, is frightening in the way that
“haunted crazy” can be more scary than “frantic crazy”. Working with a
languorous, almost submarine deliberateness, she and Lanthimos find a zone
where the usual rules of human interaction seem to be thrust into question.
Under normal circumstances, there is indeed no reason to expect that anybody’s
grief would be lessened by hiring a “stand in” for a loved one—but that’s a
judgment rooted in our current practices. There have been weirder customs
observed around the world.
Alps opened in the US last year on two screens, and closed two weeks later. It’s not exactly joyous material, but it is quite possibly topical, considering the current state of the Greek nation. Modern Greece itself was always a kind of “stand in” for the ancient version that northern Europeans idealize. Arguably, Greece was let into the European Union more on the basis of its past glory than its present state. As Papoulia demonstrates here, there can be risks to allowing impersonators into the family.
© 2012 Nicholas Nicastro
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