Christos Nikou – The Framing Device

Anna (Jessie Buckley) drives along just as the dulcet tones of Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart fades out on the radio. The DJ thanks the caller for their request and commiserates on their negative test “it happens to us all”. Anna is a teacher currently between jobs and even the woman on the other side of the desk asking her job-related questions is lamenting negative results. While all will become clear whatever is happening is effecting plenty of people. Plus, if you have seen Christos Nikou’s debut film Apples, you’ll know that this almost-dystopia isn’t so far removed from the world we currently inhabit.

Later that evening, Anna receives a phone-call from The Love Institute offering her a job – overcome with curiosity she accepts on the spot but keeps it to herself. At dinner with her partner, Ryan (Jeremy Allen White) and coupled friends the ‘tests’ are explained, sort of. Couples visit The Institute, take the test, and based on its outcome it will be determined if those in the relationship(s) are actually in love. Anna and Ryan took it years previously, they are what Helen Fielding would call ‘smug marrieds’ (albeit just co-habiting and not actually married). Did you know that only those who sleep soundly and sing aloud to songs are actually in love?

When she starts at her new place of work under the management of divorcé Duncan (Luke Wilson). He who delivers her induction which includes Playmobil figures and a multitude of toy-realised scenarios (meet-cuticles, shall we say… I’ll get my coat). Anna is then assigned to shadow Amir (Riz Ahmed) as she learns the ropes. It’s a quirky set-up in which couples arrive (in a multitude of races but always heteronormative duos. NB. the gay couple who ‘break’ the machine later in the film) and are put through their paces, their connection prodded and poked at, their bond put to a slew of tests. Like, can they identify their partner while blindfolded just from body odour or do they trust each other enough to be flung out of a plane from a great height while sharing a parachute? All the while listening to the sound of pee-inducing rain through the sound system or only singing French lyrics during karaoke – c’est romantique et la lange d’amour!

Just like in Apples, the analog and digital dichotomy is blindingly obvious and yet again, somebody is assigning tasks/tests to ascertain some kind of proof of diagnosis as it were i.e. loss of memory or, here, romantic compatibility. Until the final test and they have a fingernail (of their choosing) ripped out with pliers which is then placed in a petri dish and shoved in a microwave-esque piece of machinery before the result is determined.

Anna throws herself into her job and makes many test suggestions along the way, some of these even find their way home. Perhaps she and Ryan can shower each other after drawing their portraits or pull a Sam/Molly Swayze/Moore at the pottery wheel. It becomes apparent that Anna is delighted by love and the prospect of it and yet still won’t disclose to her one-and-only where she goes everyday. Why is she so bothered by his opinion (he loathes the Institute though we never find out why)?

Like its predecessor, Fingernails is a quiet, wry look at love and human connection, an allegory on the belief of love. Its premise isn’t so far-fetched when one considers how the majority of us look for it in this day and age courtesy of social media, dating apps and the reliance of technology. Matches made based on a percentage score following a few asinine and inconsequential questions, algorithm and the swiping of a finger. There’s a timeless quality before technology is onmipresent – shot on 35mm - to the film, a space without mobile phones before technology is omnipresent. Visuals suggest it could be the nineties but music gives an eighties flavour. The soundtrack is, just like Apples, perfectly curated for the subject matter at hand: Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart, Only You and Don’t Go by Yazoo, and Frankie Valli’s The Night providing emotional heft and accompaniment when needed.

There’s an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind melancholy and Truman Show tragi-comedy to Nikou’s sophomore feature which is less dark (figuratively and literally speaking), the colour palette is still muted and muddy in tone with the occasional flash of red. The filmmaker refutes the whole ‘Greek Weird Wave’ label and cites American cinema as his main influence - hammered home by the North American setting and English speaking cast. Stylistically speaking it is not quite dystopian but something is definitely off in this absurdist allegory and the search for human connection and true love. Love is instinctual, it needs to be felt, and according to a working class hero is all you need. The course of which never did run smooth, unlike the healthy nailbed.

Fingernails is available to watch on Apple TV+

Apples (Dir. Christos Nikou, 2020)

We are introduced to the nameless protagonist of Apples [Mila], played by Aris Servetalis, in his apartment, through a series of cuts (or polaroid snapshots) restlessly listening to the radio…staring impassively into space… banging his head against the doorframe before venturing out to buy the flowers himself much like the eponymous Mrs. Dalloway. Though there is no party in sight for Aris as he wanders aimlessly through the city and eventually falls fast asleep on a bus taking him from A to B. When the driver awakens him, Aris doesn’t recall where he should have alighted, his name or where he lives – his lack of identification only confirms it and he is packed off in an ambulance to the Disturbed Memory Department of the Neurological Hospital for evaluation.

From there, he is assigned a number (14842) and afforded a new life as an amnesiac. Sudden onset amnesia is not seen as unusual as the seemingly irreversible epidemic sweeps across a modern, yet strangely analogue Athens, with neither sight nor sound of a mobile device. All amnesiacs (at least those not claimed by family members) are given tape recorders and polaroid cameras. The cassette tapes containing prompts of how to manage their “new beginnings” and the cameras are to snap proof of how they spent their days; photos stored in albums for posterity.

Christos Nikou served as Yorgos Lanthimos’ AD on Dogtooth and it initially shows. His film – based on a screenplay he co-wrote with Stavros Raptis – does fit within the so-called Greek Weird Wave in which filmmakers and writers such as the likes of Panos H. Kontras, Lanthimos, Athina Rachel Angari, and Efthymis Filippou have given us some brilliantly strange pieces of work that have painted a unique, often ideological, versions of Greek society. Yet, while his predecessors liked the darker, mordant aspects of life, Nikou’s film is far more heartfelt and poignant.

Aris throughout plays it deadpan even when he meets fellow new beginner Anna (Sofia Georgovassili) and as he chomps his way through, roughly, an orchard. Servetalis is a combination of Daniel Day-Lewis and Buster Keaton, the line between bizarre and funny grows increasingly blurry as the film progresses, as to the linearity of the whole thing is anybody’s guess. The 4:3 aspect ratio harks back to the silent era and helps to further detach from reality – although the whole Athens-epidemic-as-narrative-device strikes close to home as we, like Aris, find a new weird normal – in our case remembering to smile with our eyes beneath the material which covers the rest of our face.

The film is a very quiet and wry allegory with several laugh-out-loud moments involving a Batman, and even a nod to an Outcast lyric. Its use of colour is gorgeous, the daylight palette tends to be muddy blues, greys and muted greens while the nights tend to be oranges and ochres much like the innards of a mouldy apple. The use of music is astute with all feeding into the theme of memory and remembrance: “Scarborough Fair”, “Seal It With A Kiss”, and “Let’s Twist Again” (although, this arguably has a dual meaning) – tenuous it may be but even “Ave Maria” mentions fruit!

Apples is a brilliant and absurdist rumination on loss, memory, identity and human connection. It ponders selective memory – the want to forget what’s in the memory bank, the fight to remember by heart and if there’s a difference, and what the hell did we do before the smart phone and documenting our days.

Apples will be available exclusively on Curzon Home Cinema from Friday 7th May.