Apples
Directed by Christos Nikou
Running time: 1hr31 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Aris Servetalis in Apples
The first thing you need to know about Apples, a wry, sly debut from Greek writer-director Christos Nikou, is that it's a film about a global pandemic, conceived and shot not long before the descent of the global pandemic we're living through now. Depending on how you look at things, that's either eerily good fortune or very bad luck: Nikou's film may be timely, but after a draining year of anxiety and isolation, is timely what we want in the movies? In this case, yes. An awful lot of blunt dramas directly about the COVID era are headed our way soon, but Nikou's oblique comedy of a world in bleary disarray hits a more tender spot than many of them will, dealing as it does with eternal crises of personal dissociation and social placelessness.
The disease ravaging the globe in Nikou's present-day dystopia is not a respiratory infection but a psychological one. A form of contagious amnesia, it strikes quietly and immediately, as mild-mannered Aris (a mournfully deadpan Aris Servetalis) finds out one morning while he’s out on a mundane errand. This is the clean-slate amnesia so beloved of classic melodrama: just like that, Aris has no memory of his name, his identity or even his address. Along with other suddenly unmoored souls, he's taken to a governmental institution where new identities are coaxed and coached out of them. (The title refers to the food for which nu-Aris develops a fondness.)
If that sounds absurd, Nikou is working in the same coolly tilted alternate reality of breakout Greek auteurs like Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite, Dogtooth) and Athina Rachel Tsangari (Chevalier, Attenberg). “Greek weird wave” is the name somewhat glibly given to this subgenre, yet Apples doesn't feel all that weird as you're watching it. Rather, there's something resonant and recognisable in its tale of literally learning how to live again in the wake of disorienting trauma, at a time when many of us are re-emerging, blinking and uncertain, into a world from which we've been distanced for so long. It's strange and sad and guardedly hopeful: a perfect film for this very moment, in fact, albeit by (un)happy accident.
APPLES (2020) | Written by Christos Nikou and Stavros Raptis | Shot by Bartosz Swiniarski | Edited by Giorgos Zafeiris
Available to watch on Curzon Home Cinema.