In the catalogue of common nightmares, teeth provide some of the most potent imagery. Primal to our mechanisms of speech and sustenance, they also embody a certain vulnerability, anxiety; memento mori, the nearest thing to our own skulls most of us ever see. Carl Jung claimed that, symbolically, losing teeth indicates a loss of “grip,” or control, “a fear of death or a somewhat dangerous communication with the unconscious.
It makes a kind of sense, then, that the idea for the unnerving short film “AIRHOSTESS-737” came to its creator, Thanasis Neofotistos, in a dream. The film’s protagonist, Vanina, struggles to perform her job as a flight attendant while enduring the pain and perceived humiliation of adult braces.
Neofotistos considers “AIRHOSTESS-737” the last installment of a trilogy that also includes his shorts “Patision Avenue,” in which a woman’s parental responsibilities and career aspirations clash, and “Route-3,” about a shy teen-ager afraid to act on his attraction to a fellow tram rider.
That hard-won peace shines through the film’s closing scene: its phantasmagoric climax, which reads as both a brush with death and a rebirth, leaves Vanina dishevelled, appearing finally at ease. She looks directly into the camera and, for the first time, really smiles.