Notes on…

Attenberg(2010)

Dir. Directed by Athina Rachel Tsangari

Celine and Julie Go Kissing?


It would be too reductive to insist on attributing Marina’s self-willed seclusion to a matter of alienated living in a not-quite-post-industrial environment. [Attenberg] is ultimately a film that asks how one can be expected to cope with life in what might be termed post-post-modernity. The film’s varied segments serve as the answers: an anarchic sense of play; the movies, including this one, that provide us with this manic brand of release; music; sex, of course; and, possibly even, if we’re lucky, love.

Andrew Schenker (Slant Magazine)


With its persistent inventiveness and a lack of unearned sentimentality, the movie provides an antidote to a lot of lazily produced dramas about death, American or otherwise.

Eric Kohn (IndieWire)


Though it makes no reference to the current economic and political crisis in Greece, Attenberg is suffused with a sense of malaise — of stasis, if you prefer a Greek word — that way well reflect the contemporary national mood. It depicts a reality in which religious and secular structures of meaning have collapsed, in which motivation is in short supply, but in which life must nonetheless go on.

A. O. Scott (New York Times)

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Marina, 23, is growing up with her architect father in a prototype factory town by the sea. Finding the human species strange and repellent, she keeps her distance...that is until a stranger comes to town and challenges her to a foosball duel, on her own table. Her father, meanwhile, ritualistically prepares for his exit from the 20th century, which he considers to be "overrated."