Peak condition

A WARM AUTUMN day in North London. The saviour of Greek cinema has joined me in a suave, wholemeal café to discuss financial meltdown, aggressive surrealism and the outer orbits of the Academy Awards. Yorgos Lanthimos doesn’t look like a messiah. He does, it is true, have a beard. But otherwise he comes across more like a quietly spoken university lecturer. He begins to poke his way through his first few answers in beautiful English.

“Well thank you. I studied English at school and I watched a lot of films,” he says. “It’s a language that you actually use, of course. It’s a funny thing. I have gotten so used to speaking about my films in English that I find it hard to speak about them in Greek. I can no longer find the words.”

What a perfect scenario for a Yorgos Lanthimos film: a man who can only express himself effectively in a language that is not his own.

“Yes. I can see that. It’s crazy.”

Now 39, Lanthimos has been making commercials and directing plays for close to 20 years. In 2005, his debut feature, Kinetta, emerged to polite applause in obscure places. But Dogtooth, an off-beam, disturbing drama from 2009, really made the Great God Cinema sit up and pay attention. Concerning a repressive father who forbids his daughters from leaving the house, the picture wallowed in a unique blend of surrealism and targeted menace. The picture won top prize at Un Certain Regard – the alternative strand – at Cannes and went on to secure an Oscar nomination for best picture.

His next appearance in the credits was as producer of an equally odd Greek film entitled Attenberg. Athina Rachel Tsangari’s picture also revelled in peculiar rituals and distorted takes on everyday reality. It looks as if a movement was underway. How long before we all agreed to celebrate the New Greek Brutalism (or whatever)?

“I think that the films were more about friendship,” he says. “I don’t really think it is a movement. But we do share philosophies about cinema. Somewhere in there you can find things that are similar. To be honest, there is no way of doing this in Greece unless one film-maker is helping the other. Your friend makes a film and then you help her make one. It’s necessity.”

Well, fair enough. But Alps, the latest picture from Lanthimos, does nothing to dispel the notion that we are watching the development of a very particular aesthetic. To use the language of science fiction, Alps appears to be set in the same universe as both Attenberg and Dogtooth. It’s a cold place in which even altruistic gestures seem selfserving. The soundtrack never happens upon any soothing beats. The dialogue is as angular as that of Harold Pinter.

The story concerns a group of people who impersonate the dead in order to ease the bereaved past their trauma.

“It emerged out of discussions with my co-writer,” he says. “We discussed various things. What happens when you die? Do your friends really remember you? How does their life change? We were trying to figure out how you could cope with that. That’s how this premise emerged. We have a nurse that ends up standing in for the dead. Where will that lead?”

Though Alps and Dogtooth have no shared characters, the films feel very much like companion pieces. This is the real world, but the environment is also quietly fantastic.

“WelI, having finished the film, I suddenly realised that main character is taking an opposite journey to the similar character in Dogtooth. She is trapped in this place and yearns to get out. But the character in Alps is trying to belong. She is trying to get in somewhere. So there are opposite journeys there.”

And both films are set in desperate, largely unhappy places. It must be an awful pain being a Greek artist in the current climate. Whether you work involves teddy bears or spaceships, interviewers will inevitably get round to wondering if the subtext is really your country’s ongoing economic meltdown. Nothing in Yorgos’s films explicitly references that calamity. But the atmosphere of simmering anxiety does seem appropriate for films created in the midst of crisis.

“I always like to let people think whatever they like. But how the crisis is connected to a film is tricky. Each affects the other in so many ways. Even when you’re the person who made the film, you can’t quite say what influenced it. The films are not about the crisis, but they are made within the crisis. So, the crisis is certain to run through them.”

One is bound to ask the same questions when considering Yorgos’s recent decision to move to London. Born in Athens, he had managed to forge a pretty successful career in the nation’s TV industry. The critical success of Dogtooth then brought him prominence within a certain highbrow elite. Plenty of directors leave home after their first hit. But Yorgos is in a different position. He must know that people suspect him of fleeing the financial maelstrom.

“Part of that maybe is true. I have been trying to make films in Greece for years and it’s always hard,” he says. “I made three there, but you always want to try other ways. So, it’s not just about the crisis. It’s about trying to evolve new ways of making films. I always wanted to work in a different language. I wanted to do that anyway. I would like to work in languages that I don’t actually speak. But it does help to move away at this time. Things were always bad in Greece. But now it’s much worse.”

But the grim events in Alps do not act as any sort of metaphor for that crisis? The film is largely set among grieving citizens. So, it could be read in that way.

“It is not consciously an allegory,” he says. “I don’t know. I think I would always be drawn towards the worst part of society. It is interesting to discover those parts. I like to expose them so people can look at them. Maybe they dismiss them. I also like to look to the ridiculous. I think I would always have been interested in these things.”

Dogtooth was one of the most critically lauded movies of 2009. It was among the most original films of the decade. There, thus, seemed absolutely no chance that it would receive an Oscar nomination in the best foreign film category. That category has always been the most compromised in a very heavily compromised array of awards. Only cute films concerning muddy-faced children need apply.

To everyone’s surprise, however, Dogtooth made it onto the long list and then, generating even greater shock, it secured a spot in the final five.

“It was a huge surprise. It is as big a deal as you can imagine. So it drew a lot of attention in Greece,” he says. “Well, the whole thing was surreal. Every aspect of it was odd. We went there to enjoy the experience and it was all very pleasant. But it’s not as glamorous as you might think. You are in a mall, basically. That contradiction is interesting. All these stars are made up and they are making their way into a mall.”

We think we know what the Oscars are like. We’ve been watching the ceremonies for decades and the rhythms all seem terribly familiar. But there must still be surprises when you actually attend.

“The most amusing part is this thing with the sitters,” he says.

Ah yes. These are the ordinary people employed to occupy seats when nominees or their guest take time out for comfort breaks. The Oscar organisers do not like the notion of empty seats.

“That’s right. They have these people all dressed up to sit in your seats They have these name tags and they throw them back when they sit down.”

Do they employ lookalikes? Was some bloke with a beard wearing a sign saying Yorgos? “No, I am afraid not. It does seem to be random. They hurry into your seat when you go to the loo. It is very different to what you see on television.”

Hang on. A man pretends to be a more important man every time that person goes to the lavatory. It sounds like a Yorgos Lanthimos film. Isn’t this where we came in?

* Alps opens next week