Feb. 06, 2013 - Issue #903: Moment by moment

Aspect Ratio

As seen on small screens

Our new column highlights films overlooked in Edmonton

Expanding the frame: this is more or less the idea. Welcome to our new column, which is a little like our old column, DVD Detective, except that where that column dealt exclusively with movies available on discs, Aspect Ratio (the term used to define the relationship between the height and width of the frame) leaves room to branch out. DVD Detective was born of frustration with the amount of interesting—or even great—cinema that wasn't making it into Edmonton theatres, and of an enthusiasm for the amount of lost, forgotten or little-seen cinema cropping up on home video. Times changed, formats proliferated, the column dissolved. Yet there's only more material to discover, report on and perhaps champion. Aspect Ratio is a place where we can draw attention not only to titles on DVD or Blu-ray, but also online, on television or at festivals. Do you love movies but feel saddened by the selection of shit at the multiplex? Do you stand dazed in video stores (yes, they still exist, thankfully) or sit dazed before your computer, cowed by the density of titles that mean nothing to you? Are you drawn to the road of movies less travelled? Watch this space.

Here was an unlikely story. A filmmaker nobody's heard of from a country whose cinema nobody follows gets together with an ensemble of actors nobody's heard of and makes a low-budget, ingeniously batshit, rather disturbing and disturbingly hilarious movie about family, repression, sensory deprivation and role-play. It's celebrated at festivals but gets only a handful of screens in its North American theatrical release. Then, shockingly, it gets an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film, a category normally reserved for the heartwarming, the cozily ethnic, the supposedly socially pertinent (and preferably with high production values, please). The film, titled Dogtooth (2009), lost to Susana Bier's In a Better World (2010), which was nothing if not (falsely) heartwarming, supposedly socially pertinent and made with high production values. Whatever—Dogtooth was nominated! A striking development, you think, and surely a major boost for the film's author, Yorgos Lanthimos.

Along comes Lanthimos' follow-up, Alps (2011), which, like Dogtooth, stars the heroic, gangly and captivating Aggeliki Papoulia. It too does well at festivals. Like Dogtooth, it has a brilliantly weird premise that allows for a blackly comical, quasi-anthropological study of human behaviour. It's about a small, cult-like group offering a novel service: if someone you love has died, call "Alps," and they will send a substitute to assume the role of your dearly departed, comforting you through the shock until you're ready to move on and accept loss. This is a story about the strange nature of grief, but even more so about what drives people to become actors. Papoulia's character is the all-too-apt pupil, getting carried away with the role of a beloved tennis-playing daughter who died from injuries sustained in an accident. Acting the part of another has a way of revealing a seeming paucity of self. And as any actor knows, it can be tough to come down once the show closes or production wraps.

Anyway, Alps is terrific. A close relative of Dogtooth, yet fresh and inventive. It barely got released anywhere. It's currently available on a no-frills DVD from Kino Lorber. Lanthimos has left his economically fraught homeland to seek opportunity elsewhere. I've met him, and I'm too not worried about him; he seems confident and resourceful. But I worry about the life of movies like his, so challenging, yet so full of promise. V  vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus