Copyright Variety
“The Brutalist’s” Emma Laird and “Dunkirk” star Fionn Whitehead are British composers whose frail bond begins to unravel on a Greek island holiday in Alex Burunova’s “Satisfaction,” a psychological drama that has its Greek premiere Nov. 2 at the Thessaloniki Film Festival. The film, which bowed earlier this year at SXSW, marks the narrative feature directorial debut of Burunova, who also wrote the script and shares a producing credit. Produced by Perfect Circle Films, Driven Equation, Carte Blanche and Constant Production, it will compete for the Golden Alexander in Thessaloniki’s main competition. U.K.-French sales-production outfit Alief is handling world sales, with UTA repping North American rights. “Satisfaction” follows the tumultuous relationship of Lola (Laird) and Philip (Whitehead), two musicians vacationing on a remote, windswept Greek island during the calm of the off-season. Gradually, a palpable discomfort in their relationship comes into focus, a troubling rift that the duo is careful to dance around. That changes when the couple bears witness to a frightening scene of domestic abuse, followed by a chance encounter with a beautiful stranger, Elena, played by “Holy Spider” star Zar Amir Ebrahimi, that upsets the delicate balance of power between Lola and Philip. Old wounds are reopened, and the couple’s long-buried trauma threatens to finally emerge into the bright Mediterranean sunlight. “Satisfaction” had its genesis in a theater play Burunova directed a decade ago, which followed a couple on vacation “struggling to address the invisible weight between them,” she says. In the process of defining that unseen burden, the director realized “it was something I had buried in myself for years, something I wasn’t ready to face.” It would take eight years and more than 100 drafts for Burunova to confront that trauma through “Satisfaction,” a film she calls “a letter to my younger self.” Saying that she felt compelled to write the script to “move through my own experience,” she describes it as an attempt “to take something painful and turn it into a story with a beginning, middle and end.” “Trauma happens to everyone. Everyone has pain,” Burunova tells Variety. “To truly heal from trauma, just facing it isn’t enough. You have to embrace it as part of your story. You have to embrace it as part of who you are and have this real acceptance and be able to say that this happened, and it made me who I am, and for that I am stronger.” “Satisfaction” is set between an unnamed Greek island and East London, where the young couple met two years earlier. There, up-and-coming composer Philip is captivated by the sight of Lola, a rising star at the Music Conservatoire, playing the piano at a house party. Their unexpected connection is complicated by the arrival of Lola’s girlfriend, Angela, played by Adwoa Aboah (“Too Much”). The intimacy between the duo nevertheless intensifies, with “Satisfaction” interweaving the heady whirlwind of their London courtship with their growing estrangement in Greece, picking up the thread at a point where Lola is trapped in an increasingly toxic situation — something Burunova compares to “Stockholm syndrome.” “Life is the stories we tell ourselves. Life is the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves,” she says. “And it’s easier to tell yourself that this is fine, and I’m okay, and this is how it should be, or this is what I deserve. And unfortunately, a lot of people who find themselves in situations like Lola, they tell themselves that they don’t deserve better. “It’s easier to stay in this unhealthy thing than to face the truth and face the pain and face the fact that you were wronged by someone you loved,” she continues. “It’s this process of self-erasure, where in order to protect the person you love, you’re willing to betray yourself and tell yourself, ‘I’m fine with this.’” Lola’s growing estrangement — not only from Philip, but from herself — finds a fitting backdrop on the remote Cycladic island of Antiparos, whose “vast seascapes and empty landscapes,” says Burunova, “make you feel so small and insignificant.” The director “felt a really strong emotional and spiritual bond with the island” from the moment she arrived, she says, adding: “When I stepped off the ferry, I had this really strong [feeling of] déjà vu, like I’ve already been there, and I’ve already shot the film.” The elements and the natural environment of Antiparos are pivotal to “Satisfaction,” with sound designer Javier Umpierrez (“Memoria,” “La Cocina”) recording hundreds of island sounds to help him craft the film’s rich auditory landscape. That’s paired with the lush photography of Hungarian cinematographer Máté Herbai (“On Body and Soul”), who captured the island’s raw natural beauty — including the dramatic churn of the Mediterranean, whose powerful ebb and flow, evoking as it does flux and transformation, offers a fitting metaphor for a film “whose DNA is change and evolution,” according to Burunova. “I think it’s a hopeful message for a story of trauma. We can get stuck in our trauma, but we don’t have to,” she says. “As human beings, we are constantly changing, evolving, shifting. And thank God, because we get to rediscover ourselves and rewrite our story. And then we write the story of who we are.” The Thessaloniki Film Festival runs Oct. 30 – Nov. 9.
