Interrogating Reality: Greek Cinema's Aberrant Aesthetic

The day-to-day fabric of our lives is scored with behaviors and desires that we have come to believe are customary, natural, and legitimate. This is only reinforced by mainstream cinema, which consistently displays a devotion to filmic and societal conventions through continuity editing, narrative coherence, and a steady propagation of dominant ideologies. The genres are familiar and the formulas are tried-and-true for most major blockbusters, which allows these films to be entertaining cash-cows for the major studios which back them. The emergence of the Greek Weird Wave destabilizes the canon. The low-budget, independent, and bizarre movies of the Weird Wave set forth a cinema of crisis where any sense of personal, societal, and national ideology is disputed. These films possess the more profound goal of functioning as a space to raise questions about the self, rather than bolster Greece’s national identity and contemporary dogmas. When this wave of cinema surged upon the shores of the film world in the late 2000s, Yorgos Lanthimos was its Poseidon. Meditating upon Lanthimos’ 2011 film Alps incites spectators to reckon with the questions of: What do we think is natural? And, what do we regard as authentic? Lanthimos’ Alps particularly exemplifies the Weird Wave’s capacity to interrogate reality and the self by challenging viewers to question the very nature of authenticity. By approaching sex scenes in a weird, deglamorized, off-kilter way, Alps forces viewers to interrogate the essence of these moments, and, by proffering a plot stricken with ubiquitous performance, shallow focus in the frame, and abnormal cinematography which cuts the heads of the subjects from the screen, Alps’ aesthetic is an interrogation of what is natural and conventional by presenting a character who is possessed with performing and governed by other forces.   

In Alps, a paramedic creates an agency that provides human replacements for lost family members. His employees include a nurse, a gymnast, and her coach, and they dress and act like the deceased they are replacing. The nurse will be this paper’s point of entry. Her name is Monte Rosa (Angeliki Papoulia), and viewers watch as she engages in reenactments of pivotal scenes from the past to help grieving people cope with the death of their loved ones. These staged moments are simultaneously constructed and reconstructed, thus immediately distancing them from spontaneity, authenticity, and ordinariness. In the film, Monte Rosa is at once the dead daughter of two parents, the deceased girlfriend of a man who owns a lamp shop, and the mistress of a blind woman’s philandering husband, who the coach pretends to be. She dresses as the daughter, and pretends to be a teen-aged tennis player; she sleeps with the store owner, and pretends to be his loving partner; she pretends to be in the throes of passions with the blind woman’s husband, in order to let her catch them and scold them. By performing the actions of the dead, Monte Rosa blurs the boundaries of reality and identity to such an extent that it becomes difficult to discern what is real and what is being performed within the story. Marios Psaras examines this concept in his book The Queer Greek Weird Wave: Ethics Politics and the Crisis of Meaning, by first highlighting how the medium of film privileges the visual, which allows filmmakers to break through the binding constraints of language. This is particularly helpful to a filmmaker like Lanthimos, since it permits him to sidestep the pitfalls of the Greek language “as a perennial marker of Greekness and national exceptionalism,” and rather prioritize the fleeting images of the ephemeral and the temporary which intrigue him so (Psaras 15). From here, it follows that Alps “fascinatingly foregrounds film’s (as opposed to verbal language’s) singular privilege as able to register the performing body precisely as such, prior to the formation of subjectivity” (Psaras 158). Subsequently, Alps’ actors are always actors and never regarded as relatable subjects, which sets up the film to focus on “the ever performing body, its meanderings through the vicissitudes of identity and the violent ways it is rendered precarious and disposable as an effect of its failure or refusal to perform according to norms and normalizing ideals” (Psaras 158). This line of thinking inspires my conviction that our sense of reality depends on our ability to perform what we consider to be normal. Monte Rosa performs scenes from dead people’s lives which she regards as touchpoints of authenticity, however paradoxically inauthentic they are. The only thing really true about her reenactments is that they are haunted by a dead person’s identity and subjectivity.

Alps resonates with Derrida’s concept of hauntology, which is a portmanteau of “ontology” and “haunting” that freakishly entails, as we see in the film, a spectral presence of the deceased looming above Monte Rosa in each frame she draws breath in. This presence haunts her beyond the grave via the past memories she is resurrecting in her performative work. This leaves Monte Rosa living in the valley between two worlds, or as Slavoj Žižek puts it, in “the domain between two deaths” (Psaras 159). As we find in Alps, the aesthetic space constructed in and by the film is privy to the domain between an actual death of an individual and their symbolic one, the latter realized through the mourning of the dead which Monte Rosa supposedly assists in. The cinematography promotes this concept of Monte Rosa as a haunted figure embodying the liminal space between life and death. A hallmark of Lanthimos’ films is framing bodies from just below the neck, which cuts off the actors’ heads and inaugurates an eerie, unconventional aura to his work. Moreover, the shallow focus frequently employed in the frame often situates her as a shifty, shadowy presence lurking amongst her corporal counterparts. The actress playing Monte Rosa, Angeliki, has the perfect gloomy look, high forehead, and gaunt cheekbones to really send this home. In numerous scenes when Monte Rosa is not reenacting the dead, including when she is walking toward the camera after leaving the ocean and when she is speaking to her father in the car, she is rendered into the form of a specter by being filmed in a shallow depth of field. Another instance of cinematographic uncanniness is when she is at work in the hospital and her image is reflected pristinely by the window, suggesting there is another presence amid her being. By the end of the film, no longer able to fit in at home with her father (as she makes an effort to seduce him, and he slaps her away) and desperately overtaken by her urge to be the dead tennis-playing girl, Monte Rosa breaks into the house of the husband and wife, sprays their daughter’s Eternity perfume on her neck, and tries to go to bed. This downright denial of her own selfhood is alarming, somewhat demonic, and suggests that performing multiple identities has laid absolute ruin to her own.

Governed by something other than herself, between whatever spirits that haunt her and the man who employs her, Monte Rosa becomes the victim of a singular biopolitical regime which profits off of her ability to perform. Her body is governed by her boss, the paramedic, who physically attacks her when she does not do her job properly. Another characteristic of Lanthimos’ films is this very sort of totalitarian, male-gendered authority figure which rules the quasi-familial, patriarchal construct presented. This operates as commentary against Greece’s traditional Orthodox values of family, patriarchy, and gender-delineated roles. Monte Rosa lacks agency under this overbearing authority, which consequently leads her to stage sex scenes where she again, lacks agency. Returning to an aforementioned moment in the film, the scene involving Monte Rosa feigning intercourse with the blind woman’s “husband” displays a level of pretense which deconstructs––to return to another of Derrida’s modes of thinking––the viewer’s own understanding of sexual relations, both in the film and beyond it. Their simulated lust is, at first take, extremely perplexing and aberrant: the two’s counterfeit moans do not match up with their awkward, stalled movements nor their fully-clothed bodies, and the viewer is mystified as to what is taking place until the blind woman begins rebuking them, physically and verbally, and the viewer discovers that this was executed for the sake of their client’s personal catharsis. Not only is the body being governed in this scene by their blind client and by preconceived notions of what sex should sound like, but also, more significantly, this denaturalization of sexual relations reveals how even the most intimate aspects of our lives are governed. Alex Lykidis, in his article “Crisis of sovereignty in recent Greek cinema,” outlines how this depiction of limited agency is related to the decline of popular sovereignty in European politics and the modern Greek nation state. The consent of the people has gradually grown less important and valuable, and so, in reaction to the ensuing social regulation that has been imposed upon generations, in Alps sex is “portrayed as a type of language, corrupted by discourse and weighed down by convention, rather than as a site of potential liberation,” which only isolates Monte Rosa further from herself and from others (24).

The Weird Wave’s oppositional aesthetics are an avenue to liberation––which comes as a relief amidst all of this discussion over hauntological possession, totalitarian figures, and biopolitical regimes. The film Alps functions as a space to raise questions about the self, authenticity, convention, and performativity, rather than ascribing to history’s typical patterns of national cinema, which would involve Lanthimos’ film affirming a sense of nationalism and unity. There are too many problems in Greece for that. As the people’s lack of sovereignty is demonstrated in Monte Rosa's lack of agency, the circumstance of social governance is irrevocably imposing. Lanthimos was pushing the boundaries of film theory and practices when he released this film, especially through his uniquely alienating approach to cinematography which showcases headless bodies and translates Monte Rosa’s image to something unearthly. Her constant performance and reiteration of deceased people’s behaviors makes her own life void of meaning and breeds spectral presences to haunt, and eventually ruin, her sense of self. This ultimately leaves her stuck in the liminal realm between life and death, meaning and nothingness, as she is eternally departed from her own self, a victim of social and authoritarian regulation, and entirely incapable of realizing authentic experiences for herself or for others.

Works Cited

Lanthimos, Yorgos. Alps. 2011.

Lykidis, Alex. “Crisis of sovereignty in recent Greek cinema.” Montclair State University.

Psaras, Marios. The Queer Greek Weird Wave : Ethics Politics and the Crisis of Meaning. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.