Alps (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2011)

Aris Servetalis in Alps

Nurse: Angeliki Papoulia
Stretcher-bearer: Aris Servetalis
Coach: Johnny Vekris
Gymnast: Ariane Labed
Lamp Shop Owner: Efthymis Filippou
Teenager: Nikos Galgadis
Tennis Player: Maria Kyrozi
Tennis Player's Mother: Tina Papanikolaou
Tennis Player's Father: Sotiris Papastamatiou
Nurse's Father: Stavros Psyllakis
Nurse's Father's Girlfriend: Konstadina Papoulia
Blind Woman: Eftychia Stefanidou

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Screenplay: Efthymis Filippou, Yorgos Lanthimos
Cinematography: Christos Voudouris
Set decoration: Anna Georgiadou
Film editing: Yorgos Mavropsaridis

Like his Dogtooth (2009), The Lobster (2015), and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), Yorgos Lanthimo's Alps is a fable about hubris, a kind of screwball tragedy. The Alps are four people who have taken it upon themselves to relieve the suffering of those whose loved ones have recently died. This they do by acting as surrogates for the dead, reliving moments the bereaved once shared with their loved ones, which can range from conversations to care-giving (one of the bereaved is blind) to sex. The head Alp, who calls himself Mont Blanc, is an ambulance driver, and another Alp, who calls herself Monte Rosa, is a nurse, which puts them both in a good position to locate those in need of their services. The other two are a young gymnast and her hypercontrolling coach. We first meet them when the gymnast is performing a floor routine to the accompaniment of "O Fortuna" from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana. She protests that she wants to perform to pop music, but he sternly insists that she's not ready for that yet. The gymnast, however, is deemed ready for her first turn as a surrogate, and the opportunity affords itself when the ambulance driver brings in a young accident victim, and the nurse takes over care of her as a patient, ingratiating herself with the young woman's parents. But the nurse has other plans: She wants to take over as the surrogate and pocket the money earned herself. So when the patient dies, she tells the other Alps that the woman has gone home to recuperate. What plot Alps contains centers on this subterfuge and its discovery. Other Alpine relationships form the rest of the story, which like most of the films directed by Lanthimos and co-written with Efthymis Filippou, becomes engagingly weirder as it goes along. Some critics have objected to the detached tone of the film -- Roger Ebert called it "a sterile exercise" -- and following it is sometimes like trying to work a puzzle in the dark -- Christos Voudouris's cinematography literally keeps some scenes in the shadows -- but Lanthimos is, as usual, a filmmaker like no other.

Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009)

Angeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni, Hristos Passalis, Michele Valley, and Christos Stergioglou in Dogtooth

Father: Christos Stergioglou
Mother: Michele Valley
Older Daughter: Angeliki Papoulia
Son: Hristos Passalis
Younger Daughter: Mary Tsoni
Christina: Anna Kalaitzidou

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Screenplay: Efthymis Philippou, Yorgos Lanthimos
Cinematography: Thimios Bakatakis

Dogtooth might be taken as a satire on helicopter parenting, were it not that the imagination of Yorgos Lanthimos seems too expansive to be confined that way. The film begins with Mother providing vocabulary lessons to her children, except that the definitions of the words are hilariously incorrect: The word "sea," for example, means "a large armchair." And soon we meet Father, who is bringing home Christina, a young female security guard from the place where he works. She is securely blindfolded during the trip, and when they get there she is shown to a room where she and the Son strip and have sex -- a task the Father occasionally hires her to perform. Other than that, the three children, all of them young adults, have no contact with the outside world -- they've been told that they can go outside only when they shed one of their "dogteeth." They live in an expensive house surrounded by a high wall, and are never allowed outside. They have a television set, but it is used only for home videos. When a cat wanders onto the grounds, the Son kills it with garden shears, and on learning of the intruder the Father slashes his clothes and smears himself with fake blood, then tells them that cats are the most dangerous creatures on Earth and has them get down on all fours and bark like dogs, training them on how to respond if another cat should make its way into their enclave. Eventually, however, the world intrudes, largely because of Christina, who gets bored with the perfunctory sex with the Son, who refuses to gratify her orally, so she teaches the Older Daughter the fine art of cunnilingus, setting off some experiments with licking between the two daughters, usually involving body parts like the shoulder or the inside of the thigh. Christina also gives the Older Daughter some videotapes in exchange for her sexual favors. We gather from the Older Daughter's parroting of lines from the movies that they include Rocky (John G. Avildsen, 1976) and Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975). When Christina's transgression is discovered, she's banished from the enclave and the parents decide that one of the daughters should take her place in gratifying the Son. But the damage has been done: Older Daughter knocks out one of her canines with a dumbbell and, bleeding profusely, hides in the trunk of the Father's Mercedes. The macabre humor of Lanthimos's film lends itself to all sorts of interpretations: Is it, for example, a lampoon of homeschooling? A fable about the repressive power of society? A knock on utopian theorizing? Dogtooth never quite goes as crazily baroque as Lanthimos's The Lobster (2015) -- or, to judge from the reviews, his latest, The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) -- but its consistent exploration of a warped worldview is fascinating.