Yorgos Lanthimos
A Kind of Kindness

Step right up! Three Lanthimos for the price of one!

Returning soon enough is the Greek "genius" director, after the mainstream success of Poor Thing (2023) Golden Lion in Venice and winner of 4 Academy Awards...

He returns paired with his historical screenwriter Efthymis Filippou, and offers us some kind of kindness in a film of almost three hours, divided into three standalone episodes but closely connected to each other by theme, cast (in each episode we find the same group of actors playing various characters, with the front pair Stone/Dafoe fresh from Poor Things), indeed. The directing style, the setting of the soundtrack, the atmospheres, are quite similar, consistent, and homogeneous.

In the first episode, a middle-aged career man is at the service of his deus ex-machina, who literally programs his life, for years, in every detail, even dictating the rhythms of his daily life, the sleep-wake schedule, the diet to follow, the book to read…

In the second, the wife of a police officer is a noted oceanographic researcher. She disappears at sea with her vessel and her staff during a storm. She will be found, but for her husband, she will not be the same wife as before, or perhaps he is the one who has changed…

In the third, a woman leaves her family to follow an improbable sect devoted to the cult of purity and which is seeking a mythical woman capable of resurrecting the dead…

I have a conflicted relationship with this director; he simultaneously attracts and repels me. The fascination arises from the fact that he is a director of nightmares, à la Lynch, a cup of tea I gladly drink. Furthermore, he has a personal, original style, both as a director and in how he sets up the work, how he directs the actors. For the atmospheres, for the ability to create his own world, his own vision, cold, dystopian, morbid, disturbed, in a word: uncomfortable.

The themes he tackles, for better or worse, are always the same: I'm not sure I've pinpointed them all, there are multiple aspects related to interpersonal relationships among human beings. I'd say incommunicability, dependencies, sex without a doubt, from which Lanthimos seems obsessed or at least places it at the center of human relationships, not only as necessary but as a catalyst and for how it determines, maneuvers, establishes, and marks human interactions.

Another important element, the common thread of the three medium-length films, is the master-servant relationship, especially in the first episode, which I preferred the most. Or a love (??) relationship that culminates in the total loss and abandonment of oneself in favor of the other (the second episode, the most disturbed, which I liked the least). But it's the "dependency" element that I find more emphasized, dependency on the already mentioned sex, dependency on the other, dependency and/or psychic and physical need for an ideal, a certainty, an ideology, almost as if it were a lifeline to avoid drifting away. Yes, because it's a humanity adrift, in disarray, that of Lanthimos, a "disturbing" and perpetual restlessness, punctuated by the icy notes of a piano, trait d'union as the soundtrack of the three films within the film, distressing, dry, and alienating notes breaking a silence foretelling the worst. All surrounded by a wall of incommunicability, of distance between the bodies and souls of human beings, who thus seem "trapped" in the film and in their destiny, which appears inescapable.

A complex and ambitious work, the kinds of kindness that emerge here and there during the three hours are often bizarre and demand too high a price to pay. Beyond personal tastes, Lanthimos is undoubtedly a contemporary director of great significance and, in the field of cinematic art, it is impossible not to reckon with him. It is for this reason that, exclusively for cinema lovers, A kind of kindness is an essential film, to be seen out of "duty" more than pleasure, possibly in the original language.