Killing of sacred Hollywood
Before arriving at Kinds of Kindness, Yorgos Lanthimos managed to expand his cinema (and popularity) to a wider audience with his last two films. Far from the very austere stories of his Greek beginnings (Canine et Alps), more accessible than his dystopian experiments (The Lobster) or tragic (Killing of the sacred deer) with Colin Farrell, La Favorite et Poor creatures were more attractive works on paper, more pleasant to summarize, in particular thanks to the filmmaker’s collaboration with screenwriter Tony McNamara.
And given his change of style, even of thought with Poor creatures abandoning a characteristic cynicism for a form of humanism, we could ask ourselves a question: has the Yorgos Lanthimos of the beginnings disappeared? Is it that had his legendary nerve and his fierce black humor been smoothed out by his arrival on Hollywood lands? Only six months after his Golden Lion, the Greek decided to respond in the most beautiful way with his Kinds of Kindness.
There is indeed something jubilant in seeing the Greek, helped by his hard-won celebrity, set about transpose the cruelty of its first universes to the heart of modern America in Kinds of Kindness. And it is all the more exhilarating that the filmmaker does it with, above all, Jesse Plemons (definitely an actor capable of playing anything) and the admired (and admirable) Emma Stone.
Seven years after receiving the Oscar for Best Actress for La La Land, the actress has made a complete change in her career choices. While she will soon play in the crazy western of the king of Malaysia Ari Aster and she participated in the UFO The Curseshe has continued her moult at Lanthimos since La Favorite. And fans of the actress should be completely disillusioned after the colorful and humanist adventure of her Bella Baxter, both Kinds of Kindness is perhaps the absolute nemesis of Poor creatures (for which she received her second statuette).
love, death & humans
By reuniting with his screenwriter Efthymis Filippou (behind his first ultra-cynical works), Yorgos Lanthimos completely turns the table. No more sophisticated sets and alluring costumes, its Kinds of Kindness is the complete opposite. Accompanied by haunting music that is deliberately annoying (even if never as stressful as the strident notes of The Lobster), its staging retains an obvious Kubrickian influence (in the symmetry in particular) but finds a form of sobriety and a less ostentatious character.
No more crazy frames and lenses (no fish-eye to report), Lanthimos here composes shots of disturbing rigidity to better focus on the place of his characters. The filmmaker thrusts them into a world of terrifying uniformity (the empty corridors, the show houses, the love of windows and transparency, etc.) and into the heart of a contemporaneity that suits him so well. Certainly, Kinds of Kindness East his most austere film since his Greek experiments, the most grating and the most unlovablethat’s the whole point.
Because the film may well start on the catchy Sweet Dreamsof Eurythmics, this is obviously an insolent deception on the part of Lanthimos. No tender dream (or almost) awaits us during the 2h44 of this triple cruel fable which will on the contrary plunge us into a myriad of everyday nightmares. Indeed, Kinds of Kindness, either Kinds of kindness in French, will transform the beautiful attentions of its characters to make them the object of unease and the trigger of excesses.
The love that the characters can have for each other is no longer so much a simple desire or a simple emotion. Like his entire filmography, Yorgos Lanthimos studies all the entrenchments, revealing the worst aspects of love as a means of domination, submission, control, consumption… And so, in a world where humans feel the need to be loved in order to continue to exist, how far could they go to enjoy this condition? Lying, devotion, self-mutilation, violence, horror… and finally, a gentleness that is too often opportunistic or interested.
weirdest zone
With three different stories (but linked by a mysterious character named RMF), Lanthimos then explores all the vicissitudes of the human condition, particularly through questions of power, control, belief, identity, work and free will. He enjoys dissecting the paradoxes of his anti-heroes according to their social, professional, sexual, romantic relationships… to better probe the way in which they will (inevitably) twist.
This results in a triple oddity in one where it is frankly impossible to determine in advance what will happen to the characters. It is even difficult to really understand their intentions, the ambiguity of each person increasing as the situations progress. This is particularly obvious in the second segment (perhaps the most successful) where Lanthimos plays brilliantly with his narration (and the question of point of view) to establish a very disturbing atmosphere before everything explodes in our faces and shakes our certainties .
Whether it follows a man whose life is written by another, traces the growing paranoia of a husband towards his wife or immerses us in the daily life of a sect, Kinds of Kindness is therefore completely unpredictable. The story is capable of throwing on the screen an outrageous orgy as much as a liberating techno dance or a crazy collector’s item, in the middle of completely hallucinated daydreams (dogs kings of the world) and unexpected bloody breakthroughs (we eat a lot in Kinds of Kindnessfrom chocolate to a good slice of human flesh).
To describe his Twilight Zone, Rod Serling spoke of a world “at the crossroads of darkness and light, of science and superstition, the meeting point of the darkness created by Man’s ancestral fears and the light of his knowledge”. Kinds of Kindness is a sort of more transgressive and contemporary homage… except that it does not take place in a universe “beyond what is known to man” but indeed in our world, the one where we have gradually become imprisoned without realizing it.
With the evolution of the segments (a first realistic, a second surrealist and a third totally embracing the fantastic) and behind the absurdity of these little stories, Lanthimos then allows the whole thing to take on a real sociological dimension, sometimes wild, brutal and sinister, sometimes hilarious, grotesque and galvanizing. It’s of course double or nothing and Kinds of Kindness will necessarily divide, but It’s hard to fault Lanthimos for its relevance and bite.
