Not that Yorgos Lanthimos had gone anywhere. But in his last couple of outings, especially ‘Poor Things’, there was a little more whimsy and playfulness. With his Cannes competition entry ‘Kinds Of Kindness’, he has returned to his familiar tactics designed to bring us to the edge, and keep us there. I really couldn’t predict what he would resort to next, except in a couple of places. And while that makes for the best kind of film, it can never be described as any kind of kindness.
How would you respond if your boss– control freak doesn’t even begin to describe Willem Dafoe’s character in the first of three stories– demands that you do something that will almost certainly not only kill someone, and inflict severe injuries on your own self, and not take no for answer. Jesse Plemons’ faithful employee, who lives in a fancy house with all mod cons, and a wife who appears supremely content, realises that once you check into this mansion, there’s no leaving. The consequences are unimaginably awful.
We see a man unravelling in front of our eyes in this first of three stories, all set in New Orleans constructed in a hyper-real aesthetic which would remind you of Wes Anderson, just a little, if it were more cutesy. But it is not, so everything comes off sinister, served up with a side of menace, and unease is the dish Lanthimos most loves. Of the other two strands of the triptych, one is about a cop who gets suspicious of his wife who returns after a long absence, as she feels wrong.
ALSO READ | Coppola’s Megalopolis is a monumental mess, but also a pean to the past: Express at Cannes
For one, she eats chocolate ; his wife never did. There are other signs that there’s something off about her. Who could she be? The result is hard-to-look-at gruesomeness. Sharing the screen with Dafoe, Plemon and Emma Stone, back with the director after her Oscar-winning turn in ‘Poor Things’, is Margaret Qualley, Mamoudou Athie, Hunter Schafer and Hong Chau, all of whom switch parts in the three stories, repertory-style.
The third story is the weakest of the lot, in which a commune-like place, run by a couple who appear to be deceptively calm and placid, becomes the site of stranger things. Can someone actually bring back the dead with just a touch? Can someone lick a body-part to recognise whether it is ‘contaminated’? By this point, I was all out of shock-and-awe ; I mean how many times can you collect your jaw from the ground? Best to let it sit there, till the thing gets over.
We don’t expect genteel love-making in Lanthimos’s movies. But here he takes it to an extreme : roofies are slipped into unsuspecting women’s drinks, forced copulation and threesomes is on the cards, as is a man demanding a body part cooked to perfection because he is hungry and wants meat. Cannibalism isn’t new in the movies, even India has one of its own : anyone who hasn’t watched Bhaskar Hazarika’s ‘Aamis’, may please see how it is done. But I do draw the line at a blob of meat– a dead woman’s liver– congealing on the floor.
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Festival de Cannes (@festivaldecannes)
At its best, ‘Kind Of Kindness’ does what Lanthimos does best : he gives us pure, visceral, original cinema (‘Dogtooth’, ‘The Lobster’, ‘The Killing of a Sacred Deer’ have all premiered in Cannes) imbued with such startling imagery ,that you forgive him his excesses. Part of the pleasure, in fact, is to lean into them, especially when it comes to watching the brilliant Emma Stone, back with the director after her Oscar-winning turn in ‘Poor Things’, do more of the same.
The sheer physicality of her actions informs her whole being, and we are left to observe, in awful fascination, just how depraved things can get. Just when you think it can’t get any worse, it does. If there’s one thing you can take away from Lanthimos’s singular vision, is that there’s no end to human savagery, nor resilience and invention. That’s how mankind has managed to beat Darwin, and survive.
At the film’s lively press conference, Stone said that she doesn’t necessarily look for a ‘message’; she does films that interest her : ‘I am a feminist and I like working with Yorgos Lanthimos’. The director himself took a broader view of his work, saying it is just an observation of life, with all its darkness and ridiculousness and awkwardness, and ‘we try and inform all of that’.
Click for more updates and latest Hollywood News along with Bollywood and Entertainment updates. Also get latest news and top headlines from India and around the World at The Indian Express.
Disclaimer: The copyright of this article belongs to the original author. Reposting this article is solely for the purpose of information dissemination and does not constitute any investment advice. If there is any infringement, please contact us immediately. We will make corrections or deletions as necessary. Thank you.
