You might say that Alps, the title of Greek director Giorgos Lanthimos' follow-up to masterful Dogtooth, is sort of an inverse synechdoche (the word, but by extension Charlie Kaufman's movie too) - instead of one small piece standing in for the whole, here we've got one large piece (an entire mountain range) standing in for... well nothing. The proprietor behind the business that gives the film its title here explains what the name means - the mountains are the best mountains and can never be bettered, but they can better the lesser mountains - but that really only takes us further into absurdity. Which is right where he wants us to be.
Where Dogtooth kept us confined inside its vacuum-sealed bizarro society, Alps takes us outdoors amongst the world. But not really. It's just as askew a place, and the rules we normally attribute to How People Behave is dutifully kept at arm's length. It seems he wanted to stop letting his countrymen off the hook (and you do get the feeling that Lanthimos is speaking directly at his own society with these movies) by locking up the weirdness behind a big wooden fence - here it spills across the streets and gyms and lamp-shops. Everybody is so not normal. Scenes echo across each other in a prism of false-hoods so complex its dizzying - where does the play-acting end and the real world start? And does it matter? If all it takes is a happy pop song and a pink ribbon to make believe it's a happy ending, then why fight it?
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