Yorgos Lanthimos returns to his “way”, after the pop detour of Poor Creatures! (The fabulous world of Amélie of this era, whatever it may be) the Greek director gives the public a crooked, repelling but magnetic object, difficult to handle. With Kinds of Kindness (in cinemas since last June 6), the Greek director – while holding onto the money of an international production (Film4 and Searchlight Pictures, which means Disney) and with a cast of now loyal stars – returns to the basics of the irreverent cinema that made an author (remember that authors as such always make the same film, always write the same book…). During the assembly of the previous one Poor Creatures! Lanthimos got to work developing and focusing with his trusted screenwriter, Efthymis Filippou (Dogtooth, Alps, The Lobster), some old and new stories, creating in a short time Kinds of Kindness, an episodic film starring Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley once again. Jesse Plemons (awarded at Cannes for his triple interpretation) and Hong Chau were then added to the cast. The actors play different characters in each story, seemingly unrelated to each other, but an unnamed character, identified only by his initials, RMF (Yorgos Stefanakos), acts as a silent common thread.
Historical digression. The New Greek Cinema, from 2009 onwards – riding (in spite of itself) that crisis that led the country to bankruptcy – has been characterized by a handful of authors and producers who have been able to give shape (and images) to disturbing feelings and a new reality, alienating and desolate. At the beginning Lanthimos was the most prominent figure of this new cinema, born in times of black crisis, with zero budget productions. Loneliness becomes a central dimension, to be observed, analyzed and conquered (perhaps), oppression is the new dominant rule in a world that no longer has known rules. The staging is characterized by stagings of unadorned austerity, with bursts of subtly macabre violence, never gore, but always extremely cruel, sharp and implacably sadistic: gut-busting. Attenberg by Athina Tsangari (2010), Wasted Youth by Argyris Papadimitropoulos (2011), Luton by Michalis Konstantatos (2013), Miss Violence by Alexandros Avranas (2013), Interruption by Yorgos Zois (2016), Miserere by Babis Makridis (2018): they are cold, minimal and silent films, with protagonists who are often nameless, just roles.
Lanthimos, the most brilliant, made himself a voice in the industrial and urban desolation, giving shape to a cultural dissent that brought the attention of critics back to Greek cinema after long years of emptiness. Greece has thus returned to showing itself as a laboratory teeming with sentimental and sexual culture which faces the abyss with a mix of anguish and apathy. To talk about his cinema, parallels and comparisons with Kubrick, Cronenberg, Haneke and Tarkovsky have been called into question: they all have something to do with it and nobody has anything to do with it. If we wanted, instead, we could bring up Pasolini and Roy Andersson (but we won’t do that). As Giulio Sangiorgio writes in the introduction of Anesthesia of solitudes, the first Italian monograph dedicated to the Greek director (signed by Roberto Lasagna, Benedetta Pallavidino, published by Mimesis), «Lanthimos, due to his marked style and provocative Weltanschauung, has managed to establish himself as a brand: that is, the last residual form of authorship (see the case of Nicolas Winding Refn and his NWR, a real brand). How a brand was copied (the new wave of Greek cinema depends above all on its success, as if the film à la Lanthimos were a genre in itself, made up of clear geometries, cynical gaze, paradoxical realism, one step away from the surreal) ».
Lanthimos, hopping from one festival to another, first attracted the attention of critics and the cinephile public, until he also landed at the Oscars and a more mainstream audience, thanks above all to the Golden Lion for Poor Creatures! (2023), an eccentric and grotesque fable – with a baroque structure and didactic narration – which the public appreciated, unconsciously welcoming it as the alternative to Barbie for those who read Bolaño. A movie, Poor creatures!, which however put distance between Lanthimos and himself, between the director he had known until then and the film that made him very famous. Although during the span of his international parable there had been a gradual dilution of his chilling cruelty, even under the pompous “costume” packaging of Favorite his gaze was clearly readable. Kinds of Kindness it is a film directed with that same gaze suspended just long enough to be successful, it is configured both as a return to the origins and as an anthological story in which Lanthimos re-embraces the themes and ways that have made him a brand of independent cinema: «Each story follows different events, but they seem to take place in the same universe. Each story has a familiar atmosphere that is mainly about the strange behavior of the characters,” said Ed Guiney, one of the director’s international producers. In the first episode we witness the revelation of a masochistic love made of orders, rewards and tests. In the second, the most mysterious, we clash with our perception of the other (and his double), in a portrait of a couple between identity and otherness where the theme of sacrifice and faith returns. In the last one, the most complex and least dry (and therefore also the least successful), we follow the search for a miraculous predestined woman by two members of a sect, with – obviously – a complex system of commandments to be respected and symbols to embrace.
Much of the Greek director’s work investigates the ways in which people live following specific rules, dictated by society or by other people (who embody archetypes and structural dynamics of society); at the center, fertilizer that gives impetus to the narrative, there is always the nature of the power relations that identify power and its distortions, its boundaries. These themes, with the help of black and grotesque humor, are pushed in absurd directions: for Lanthimos, oppression is a social rite with precise and cruel rules, language is a means of manipulation and distortion, violence is always psychological first, then physics, in its most extreme and cruel outcomes. The bodies of others are at the center of an obsession, that of control. The director could therefore not fail to land, sooner or later, in the mental spaces of a sect, a dimension that welcomes all the matrices of his poetics which are by nature ontological. In Kinds of Kindness we are witnessing a game of chases: faith and the absence of faith, love and the absence of love, it is a narrative made up of full and empty spaces, in search of a moral balance that seems impossible to achieve. There is a continuous tension between the desire to be loved, accepted, to feel part of something (a family, a couple, a sect) and the desire to be free, alone, emancipated from power dynamics. Yet, overwhelm seems to work like a warm and reassuring blanket, comfortable, impossible to give up.
Even the film’s soundtrack, signed by composer Jerskin Fendrix (who returns to work with Yorgos after Poor Creatures!), moves between full and empty spaces, inhabiting the feelings of the characters and the (unbridgeable) distance between them, punctuating the episodes with disturbing choirs, solemn and dark, and aseptic and strident piano notes. New Orleans, a non-city city that becomes an incubator of non-places (the hospital, the motel, the police station, the swimming pool), acts as a theater by granting its liminal spaces in which the emptiness of alienation resonates, as aseptic manifestations of mental prisons (backrooms?). Yorgos thus returns to move with coldness and a macabre sense of the ridiculous, inside and outside the uncanny valley where the plausible and the absurd, the familiar and the inexplicable overlap, insinuating themselves into each other to the point of making it impossible to distinguish their contours, their boundaries. The public who met him with The Favourite And Poor Creatures! will find themselves faced with a particularly difficult product (resulting in a secret escape from the theater), but the cinema that challenges the spectator is a cinema that proves to still be alive, invigorating.
