The Greek competition film “Animal” was shown at the Locarno festival

At the festival in Locarno, the Greek competition film “The Animal” was shown. A satirical sketch of resort life, thanks to the directorial skills of Sofia Exarchu and the acting work of Dimitra Vlagopulu, turned out to be an outstanding event. Tells Andrey Plakhov.

The heroes of this “resort film” are animators working at the Mirage Hotel on one of the Greek islands. A tourist paradise turns into a hell for those who serve it. They, young and not so young, are the cogs of a giant machine, gladiators, whose souls, bodies and lives are exposed to the needs of dear guests. Every day, the animators put on a stage costume, stick a smile on their faces and go to amuse the audience. They are like jukeboxes, ready to play any tune on demand.

The main character Kalia has been doing this for years with unbridled intensity. Her crowning number – a grotesque performance of the song by the duet Baccara “Yes, sir, I can dance boogie-woogie” – she demonstrates more than once in the frame and every time she goes into a rage. Often late at night, having served the guests of the hotel, she goes to a nearby club to earn extra money with a sparkling dance there. But the excitement fueled by alcohol is followed by a night cramp and a depressive morning hangover. Little helps quasi-marital sex with a friend in misfortune, the same restless animator, in a kennel in the back of the hotel. When her injured, bleeding leg aches especially sadly and unbearably, Kalia grabs the first guy she comes across and drags her to a dirty sandy beach.

Dimitra Vlagopulu plays a real actress in the shower, drowning out the pain with another stage triumph. Even if it’s a triumph in quotation marks, if a retired client touches her breasts while dancing, or if she has to perform in makeup and a fish costume. Smeared with gel, wrapped in plastic wrap, Kalia turns the stupidest “fish ballet” into a masterpiece of tourist kitsch.

The central female image is built not only by acting techniques; Monika Lenchevskaya’s camera zooms as close to the object as possible, emphasizing muscle tension, manipulations with the face and hair – titanic efforts that are brought to the altar of the temple, above which “all inclusive” is displayed with golden tablets. This commandment involves not only food and drink in unlimited quantities, but also entertainment without shores, and targeted – focused either on German, or Austrian, or Russian tourists.

Resting children of different nations also want to shine on the stage, at least in the karaoke format. A young German woman, mercilessly false, torments the Italian Felicita. Mediators go out of their way to please the Russian party: here are “I am innocent and pure” (translated by Madonna), and “A Million Scarlet Roses”. And drunk, Kaliya recalls the most toxic performance in which she had a chance to participate in, it seems, in the last century, when fur coat troops occupied Greece. The girls went on stage in fur coats over their naked bodies, which were decorated with the Russian tricolor. The image of the beauty, packed in animal skins, gave the name to this film. But Kaliya is as much an animal as she is a goddess, she is like Venus in furs. The comparison seems all the more apt since a primitive statue of this goddess, Aphrodite in ancient Greek mythology, sticks out in front of the hotel directly into the sea instead of a buoy.

The poisonous image of modern tourism, fused with the sex industry, calls to mind the films of Ulrich Seidl. And the dance marathon, run by the heroine with her last breath, is reminiscent of Sydney Pollack’s old picture “Hunted horses are shot, aren’t they?”. Perhaps Pollak’s humanism is closer to Sophia Exarchu than Seidl’s rigid documentaryism. At the same time, the breath of the Greek school is clearly visible in the film, with its ruthless voyeurism and cold detachment.

While the audience is immersed in the problems of Kaliya, another female fate passes in the background, but it turns out to be no less symbolic. Eva (Flomaria Papadaki) is a seventeen-year-old Polish girl who follows the same path as the main character. This she performs in the finale in the beautifully broken Russian “Million Scarlet Roses”, dressed not in furs, but in feathers: if not a captured animal, then a wounded bird.