Attenberg (2010)

As with all of Athina Rachel Tsangari's work, Attenberg is a unique exploration of feelings rarely spoken. To understand this film, you've got to understand its mood, and to understand its mood, you've got to understand the 1970's punk drone band, Suicide.

In a 2002 interview, lead singer Alan Vega said, "We were talking about society’s suicide...New York City was collapsing. The Vietnam War was going on. The name Suicide said it all to us." So it goes with the movie Attenberg. Death and connection are examined from all angles. Literal death, metaphorical death, and the kind of deaths that grow from the inside; but the escape from all that death is connection through music, loyalty, family, and physicality. In the space that is cleared by the things that are lost, Attenberg grows a garden of hope, albeit with a realist eye towards the impermanence of everything.

In a 2012 interview with The New York Times, Tsangari said about Attenberg: “When you make a movie in the 21st century, half of the movie is about life and half is about cinema...why be apologetic about stealing, borrowing, referencing, outright copying?” Yet, unlike a traditional plagiarist, she paints with her influences to create something entirely new that defies comparison. It's just a perfect little thing that sits in a category all its own.

My takeaway every time I watch this film is that it is a love letter. A love letter to a favorite band, to the country of Greece, to Ariane Labed (who won best actress at the Venice Film Festival for her role), and to human relationships of every type. It's a love/hate letter to machines and our dependence on them. It's a nihilist manifesto imploring us to choose to love, and to cherish the time we have together. It's all these things, plus the anxious hum of Suicide; the frantic chase to give the love we have to give in the time we have to give it.

For these reasons and more, Attenberg will always be one of my all time favorite films.