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Theory and Phenomenology of Yorgos Lanthimos
And so it is that, less than a year after winning the Golden Lion for Poor Creatures!, the Greek genius brought Kinds of Kindness to Cannes, which today, just a few months after the previous work, we can admire in all its 163 minutes (record duration) of madness and surrealism. With the return to the screenplay of old and historic collaborator Efthymis Filippou - with whom the most important works like Dogtooth, Alps, The Lobster, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer were made -, we return to an unsettling, morbid, and perverse atmosphere. And to the macabre humor that makes Lanthimos's cinema unique in the contemporary panorama.
A humor that digs deep into human depravity, into sadomasochism, sometimes into domination.
Poor Creatures!, although a great film, was perhaps the most accessible - always within relative limits - to the general public of a director accustomed to staging destabilizing, alienating works. Often of great interpretative difficulty, in the face of the powerful allegories that obliged one to stop and reflect and speculate.
Sweet dreams (are made of this)
Who am I to disagree?
Kinds of Kindness is composed of three episodes, which are connected by a subtle yet oppressive sense of anguish, punctuated by piano sounds that in certain scenes recall the last Kubrick of Eyes Wide Shut and, in the general sense, the more extreme Bunuel of The Phantom of Liberty. Kubrick and Bunuel: always there is the return when Lanthimos is involved.
If Lanthimos were Mr. Wolf, he would take his coffee with a lot of Kubrick and a lot of Bunuel.
The bourgeoisie is overturned, deconstructed, flipped. Raising an excruciating doubt: isn't it perhaps what we consider normal already a projection of a way of living that is itself flawed? Who knows what can be considered pure and what contaminated. Assuming there really is a distinction between these apparent opposites.
In Kinds of Kindness, the dream has an important function. It serves as a premonition and metaphor, and here too poses the doubt. That the plane of reality is not reversed. That being awake is not contrary to the right order of things.
Lanthimos, being a genius of satire, enjoys putting many bugs in just as many ears and shocking with delirious and violent situations. Pregnant with self-harm and consensual self-sacrifice.
Everybody's looking for something
In the world we consider real, there will always be the double track of the victim and the oppressor, in a game where, however, the parts are not as distinct as one would believe. Indeed: what happens if those who are used and abused find pleasure in enduring it? Or in any case accept submission as awareness of their social and familial role, or perhaps of a higher plan? Without even that yearning for freedom that pervaded almost all of the Greek director's filmography.
Some of them want to use you
Some of them want to get used by you
Some of them want to abuse you
Some of them want to be abused
Annie Lennox already knew it.
Perhaps in the world, or in some alternate reality or tangent universe, we all have many doubles, dopplegangers, and when they manifest, the tear on that supposed reality we consider as such can be a revelation on everything we take for granted, and thus place everything under another perspective. A rainbow in the dark, as Ronnie James Dio sang.
In this upside-down world, or perhaps simply revealed, death and resurrection are possible, and as always one can vent with a dance before exceeding the speed limit leads to a crash.
And even kindness, at the end of the three episodes of Kind of Kindness, is no longer what it seems. After all, there are many forms of kindness and many unexpected ways to show it.
Perhaps nothing makes sense and Lanthimos dances on the corpse of bourgeois society. In any case, he leaves us suspended and without answers. Wrapped in mystery. Without points of reference, alone as at the end of Dogtooth, blind and out of frame as in The Lobster.
One could, once again, say that Lanthimos stages a sick world, but perhaps it's just the fastest shortcut not to admit that we are the disease. And that the moon is all dark.
Despite that rainbow.
No sign of the morning, just a rainbow in the dark.
Just a rainbow in the dark.
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