Yorgos Lanthimos doesn’t waste time. Just two months after winning four Oscars with Poor Creatures, the Greek filmmaker competes for the Palme d’Or with a new provocation: Kinds of kindness, a title that would translate something like ‘types of kindness’. Nothing could be further from what we will see during the almost three hours of intense and exhausting footage. If with Canino, with which he won the ‘A Certain Regard’ award on the croisette in 2009, he talked about family control, in this triptych he once again immerses himself in the thematic DNA of his origins to address the relationships of power and submission seasoned with doses of sex cult, sects, viscera and mutilated fingers. A most bizarre arsenal.
Starring again his muse Emma Stone, with whom he began collaborating on The Favorite, Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley, the director has also signed Jesse Plemons, Mamoudou Athie, Hunter Schafer and Hong Chau to represent three independent stories united by the same actors, who assume different characters in each of them. In the first one, the one that works best, it starts to the sound of the legendary Eurythmics song, Sweet dreams. Everybody’s looking for something/ Some of them want to use you/ Some of them want to get used by you Plemmons… a lyric that fits like a glove to describe a man who wants to recover his life after being subjected to the reins of a powerful boss (Dafoe) who tells her everything to do, from not having children, to what she should eat and when she can have sex, to commissioning a murder.
In the second piece, Plemmons – the best of the cast – is a police officer whose wife (Stone) has disappeared at sea and then returns home, but he does not trust that she is the same and subjects her to acts of extreme cruelty. And in the last part, Stone is a woman who abandons her husband and her daughter to join a dangerous sect led by Dafoe’s character. Her mission is to find a woman with a special gift and who is not contaminated.
The film is not at all easy to watch, like any work by Lanthimos, which is striking due to its images with several graphic and bloody scenes, filled with absurd humor. The press has received it with divided opinions. And if the film is already surreal in itself, the press conference has also gone for those shots, with Stone sparing in responses and Margaret Qualley who has appeared with a large white hat, as if she were going to parade down the red carpet , and he had a weak laugh. In fact, she was only able to ask attendees if they liked her hat. The hangover from a too long night?
Asked about the way in which he portrays the body and the physical relationship of his characters, Lanthimos has pointed out that it is something that is very present in his films. “Body language is very important. I don’t abuse the body, at least in practice. I’m looking at life, and much of it is dark, harmful, ridiculous, and uncomfortable. We try to incorporate all that and it starts from the physical,” said Lanthimos, who had been working on the script for the film for years and took the opportunity to shoot it during the post-production of Poor Creatures.
Stone agreed: “We don’t intellectually discuss what’s happening. He is very physically oriented and obviously loves to dance. When making Poor Creatures, we really discussed the way Bella Baxter walked and moved. My relationship with her body and her movement in her films is to internalize that physicality. She shows it, she doesn’t tell it.” In the third part of the film, the actress once again gives an example of her dancing skills.
During the meeting with journalists, all the actors highlighted that the working relationship with Lanthimos is based on complete trust. And Stone, the most: ”I feel extremely comfortable and I think I can do anything with him. I trust Yorgos more than I have ever trusted any other director. We have something that I can’t explain.” And he has referred to the director as “my muse,” someone who is “very different from what his films are, he is not as intense.”
The Greek filmmaker was inspired by Caligula as the basis for the first story, which was to be conceived as a single film. Then, together with Efthimis Filippou – his scriptwriter for Canino (2009) and Langosta – they decided to turn it into a triptych. The result? Three stories that reflect today’s world, which “is out of place, which is strange, crazy and sad”, as well as “ridiculous and funny”. The answers to his personal proposal are left for the viewer.
And after Coppola’s failure, another established director who has suffered a major setback is Paul Schrader, who is competing with Oh Canada, a drama about a filmmaker who decides to record a documentary remembering his life shortly before he died.
Based on a novel by Russell Banks, who died last year and from which Affliction was already adapted in 1997, the film marks the reunion between Schrader and Richard Gere 44 years after American Gigolo. The actor appears aged and in a wheelchair to play Leonard Fife, a terminally ill documentary filmmaker who gives an interview to one of his former students to explain the whole truth about his life, from his opposition to the Vietnam War, his desertion and flight to Canada to his political struggle and his loves.
A decision that he makes and executes before the tearful eyes of his wife (Uma Thruman), at the risk of destroying the image he has created of himself. Oh Canada is leaking everywhere, without direction and weighed down by an uninteresting story about truth and lies that confuses with too many flashbacks and characters that get into the present and the past without being relevant. Does anyone find Jacob Elordi credible as a young Gere? Schrader, the same man who wrote Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, and who released The Master Gardener a few months ago, was moved to tears when the audience applauded him after the gala screening. It’s a shame the film isn’t up to par.
