The Greek Weird Wave wibbles on. Apples was completed long before Covid, but it's had the supreme fortune to have anticipated at least one aspect of our present situation. Christos Nikou's film wonders what might happen if a global pandemic robbed people of their memories: what's taking hold here is an extreme version of that disorienting brainfuzz that sufferers of Long Covid will know only too well. Our protagonist, an already fairly morose soul called Aris (Aris Servetalis), pops out to buy flowers one afternoon, then wakes up at the end of a bus line several hours later with no knowledge of what he's doing there, nor where he meant to get off. Subsequently installed in a facility for the forgetful and forgotten, he's tested by doctors and eventually put in a program designed to provide patients with a replacement identity - in effect, affording them a mental makeover. The plotting chimes with how the film entire seeks to refresh certain Weird Wave tropes - from the off, in fact. Unlike the somewhat arbitrarily named Dogtooth, Alps and Attenberg, Apples' title has a concrete, literal meaning: it's the fruit for which Aris develops a habit during his hospital stay ("I don't remember if I like them"), both a familiar object to cling to and the start point for a new language. There may also be a dash of Genesis (book, not band) in there; the whole movie has the feel of a reset, a return to Weird Wave basics.
This time round, Nikou shows promising signs of containing the weirdness - and the irritation it's traditionally provoked in this viewer. The action is confined to a tight, carefully marshalled 4:3 frame; only one element - Aris, and his sudden memory loss - proves to be weird, and there's even an explanation for that at the end of the day. The doctors act how you'd expect doctors to act, as do the kids whose tiny bikes Aris asks to have a go on down at the skate park, quizzically wondering what the deal is with this unsmiling fool. Apples' best joke is that the world around Aris carries on more or less as usual, oblivious to the blank slate in its midst. Chopping back the eccentricity allows Nikou to better showcase the philosophical questions at the film's, if you will, core. (And that, surely, is what these Weird Wave films have been: philosophical texts, scribbled over to varying degrees by disruptive moviebrats.) How would you respond if your brain suddenly wiped itself, leaving no trace of a previous existence? For Aris, it's simple: you ride a bike, you eat apples, you watch old movies as if for the first time (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has rarely sounded so innocent), you record your every move with Polaroids, creating a whole new gallery of memories. Might there not be advantages to purging yourself of those old, dusty hurts, to having your baggage forcibly removed? Is it possible you'd end up having more fun than you're having right now? The Polaroids are in themselves a cinematic memory: a reminder of Christopher Nolan's Memento, which Nikou replays with an altogether more playful sense of humour - and, as in Memento, a cleverly wrought narrative development obliges us to rethink our assumptions about the protagonist. I maintain that ultralow-level drollery is the least we should be getting in return for our ten pounds - even at 91 minutes, Apples can feel strained in places - but Nikou does shape his drollery, and builds on it, and at the very last allows genuine emotion to breach the walls of defensive irony; his drollery is a foundation for something, which elevates this above the many other films in this movement where the weirdness was merely tossed up in handfuls to see where it fell. The thing about Apples is that it's just weird enough to be interesting.
Apples will be available to stream tomorrow via Curzon Home Cinema.
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