In three distinct stories, played by the same performers, filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos plays with a humanity shared between those who lead and those who obey. “Kinds of Kindness” is a fable about voluntary submission wrapped up in its pseudo-provocative effects and sneering misanthropy.
An ordinary employee places all his life choices in the hands of his boss. The latter, a true demiurge dictating his subordinate’s diet, wake-up and bedtimes, and the frequency of sexual intercourse, asks him one day to crash into a car for no other reason than to prove his devotion. The employee refuses and thus jeopardizes the foundations of his existence.
A policeman whose wife disappeared at sea sees his sweetheart return, but her unusual behavior leads him to think that it is someone else.
Finally, a woman, living in a community whose members reserve themselves sexually for their gurus, tries to find a person with supernatural power and destined to become the spiritual leader of the group.
A dark and cynical comedy
Through these three distinct stories, the author of “Lobster” and the recent “Poor Creatures” creates a comedy as dark as it is cynical around the same theme: how far are we prepared to go for love and devotion? Punctuated by Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams”, the film first intrigues with its first segment, by far the most disturbing. The sequel each time distributes different characters to the same performers, including Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley and Jesse Plemons, who walked away with the male actor prize at the recent Cannes Film Festival.
This playful role-playing game remains without doubt the main asset of “Kinds of Kindness” which, unfortunately, very quickly falls into the pitfalls of Lanthimos’ cinema, the filmmaker emphasizing the least of his falsely provocative effects, overlooking his characters and emphasizing his surface surrealism with a deafening heaviness. However, there was material for a much more acidic and disturbing film around voluntary servility than this inconsequential and sneering variation.
Rafael Wolf/ld
“Kinds of Kindness” by Yorgos Lanthimos, with Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Jesse Plemons. Available in French-speaking cinemas from June 26, 2024.
