What I love so much about Yorgos Lanthimos is how he’s stayed uncompromisingly himself. All the accolades and successes over the years seem to have done little to change the Oscar nominee and Golden Lion winner – at heart he’s still the funny, observant, intensely sharp weirdo that gave us Dogtooth. And I will always have time for someone who’s studied and built an entire filmography around the oddest, darkest impulses of human beings. Signs of a consummate humanist.
Returning to Cannes competition for the first time since The Killing of a Sacred Deer, the Greek provocateur gave us Kinds of Kindness, a triptych of twisted tales featuring the same cast of actors playing different parts. A word of caution before we get into it: if Poor Things offended your sensibilities, watch out, because this one is nasty.
To summarize the stories in the least spoiler-y terms: The first one is about the relationship between a man (Jesse Plemons) who lives to please and fulfill every random whim of his boss (Willem Dafoe); the second one is about a police officer (Plemons) who suspects the woman rescued from a failed research mission (Emma Stone) is not really his wife; the last one is about a sex cult obsessed with finding a female healer who can bring the dead back to life.
The description may sound harmless enough, but Lanthimos and Co. take things to some shocking extremes in each story. Murder, self-mutilation, cannibalism are just some of the fun to look out for. A loose common theme of the three 45-60 min shorts is the desire to serve and obey. Do we do things someone else asks us to because of a need to prove our love? To feel we belong? To satisfy a kink? None of the stories provides any explanation or justification for the characters’ behavior. They simply watch – as in a moral vacuum – the abuse and indignities as they are willingly inflicted and received.
This is not the type of screenplay that usually gets recognition because everything happens in a heightened reality according to their own logic, there’s not really a lesson to be learned at the end. But I’m quite fascinated by the work of Lanthimos and co-writer Efthimis Filippou. I find their writing fiercely efficient and clean. They create characters and scenarios so highly, specifically peculiar they transport you out of the real world with all the reason and rules right away. And there’s an intimidating honesty to the way they write. How they refuse to shame or pass judgment on even the most outrageous things said or done in the film compels you to look beyond the gags and find what they reveal about the human psyche.
Even more impressive than his writing is Lanthimos’ direction. He knows how to weird you out with an unexpected edit, violently contrasting visuals or just having the camera stay on a character’s face for a beat too long. And although Kinds of Kindness is much more malevolent in tone than say, Poor Things or The Favourite, Lanthimos still managed to craft LOL moments that catch you completely off guard. There’s just no one that can make the cruel humor of his words sing quite like he does. While I think the length of the film is an issue and it could have worked better with a slight trim, throughout the 164-min runtime you do feel like you’re in the hands of a master who not only knows exactly what he’s doing but is having the time of his life.
Of the talented cast, Plemons has the most to do and is the clear stand-out. In the story about the submissive employee, his desperation and fading grip on selfhood bring out the perversity of the dynamics in play. In the story about the paranoid husband, you see his character slowly descend into madness as he gets consumed by doubt. Especially after seeing his first performance, it’s quite striking to see him become this chilling non-human for the second one. Dafoe is very enjoyable in the first story as the mysterious madman who dictates the lives of others. Emma Stone is most prominently featured in the third story, but her turn as the maybe-body snatcher in the second one would likely stick with you longer. The scene where her character does something incredibly painful at her husband’s request is not something you can easily forget.
As we near the halfway mark of #Cannes77, my impression is that there are many “good” films but not enough “great” films in this year’s edition – there’s a reason why I haven’t been raving left and right about everything I saw. Hopefully that’ll still change in the coming days with the premieres of the new Abbasi, Baker, Cronenberg and more.
