Yorgos Lanthimos stars Emma Stone and the cream of today’s American actors in an astonishing sketch film.
Short stories where the Greek filmmaker questions our free will with dark humor, from intimacy to life in society.
A regular on the Cannes prize list, the author of “The Lobster” and “Pauvres Créatures” could well fill his trophy cabinet.
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Three is now the number of collaborations between Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone after The Favorite And Poor Creatures, Golden Lion in Venice and four Oscars including that for best actress last March. Three is also the number of stories that the Greek filmmaker and his faithful screenwriter Efthýmis Filíppou have chosen to tell us in Kinds of Kindness, a sketch film where each actor is cast in… three different roles. Maniac, did you say maniac?
In the first, Robert (Jesse Plemons) is an ordinary executive whose daily routine goes up in smoke when his charismatic boss (Willem Dafoe) asks him to commit an irreparable act. In the second, George (Plemons, again) is an inconsolable cop after the disappearance at sea of his wife (Emma Stone)… until one day she reappears in a miraculous way. But “different”. Finally, in the third, Emily and Andrew (Stone and Plemons) are two followers of a sect whose mission is compromised when the first briefly returns to her previous life. Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn and Mamoudou Athie complete this crazy-crazy cast.
“Un certain regard” prize on the Croisette in 2009 with Canine, Yorgos Lanthimos has since established himself as an author with an immediately recognizable touch, adept at a mixture of bizarre realism and dark, very dark humor. As in Killing of the sacred deer And The Lobsteralso awarded at Cannes, each character of Kinds of Kindness is faced with a dilemma that tests the morals and nerves of the viewer. Even if it means allowing yourself a few “gore” outbursts that will make sensitive souls shudder and slam a few chairs.
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Yorgos Lanthimos’ detractors see him as a vile misanthrope who only feels contempt for his characters. We want to tell them that his art of comedy consists of creating situations that exacerbate collective and individual neuroses in order to laugh at them better. And then casually, this new chapter in his filmography addresses in a rather inflated manner omnipresent themes at the start of the Cannes Film Festival such as free will and consent. Finding him back on the list would not really be a surprise.
>> Kinds of Kindness by Yorgos Lanthimos. With Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe. 2:44. In theaters June 26
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