The not-so-enfant terrible of Greek cinema, Yorgos Lanthimos (50 years old, Athens) has been accommodating his transgression to the mass public for some time. The favourite (2018) and, above all, poor creatures (2023) have turned him into a commercial filmmaker legitimized by the label of great provocateur. His mastery of staging is undeniable, as is his aesthetic talent, but poor creatures (Golden Lion at the last Venice festival) ended up drowning in its baroque style. The best thing about the film was its central character, Bella Baxter, played with undeniable risk by Emma Stone, an actress who has found in Lanthimos a perfect accomplice to explore free and unleashed female characters. Bella Baxter, however, contained a problematic paradox: her sexual revolution was based on one of the most misogynistic erotic fantasies that exist, that of a woman with the brain of a girl. A pure and innocent nymphomaniac who, deep down, doesn’t bother anyone, but rather the other way around.
The extravagance of poor creatures It worked so well that Lanthimos must have felt a bit of guilt and perhaps even panic at being sucked into Hollywood’s false backwash. The need to return to his origins, to his strangest and sickest cinema, was imposed and, in that sense, his new film, Kinds of Kindness, Presented this Friday in the official section of Cannes, it does not disappoint. It doesn’t convince either. It is made to displease and bother. The problem is that beyond that there is not much more.
Kinds of kindness is composed of three fables about emotional breakdowns, well seasoned with viscera and sex, and with the same cast of actors in different roles: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, Mamoudou Athie and , in a cameo that seems made just to undress her, Hunter Schafer. Although the stories are not connected to each other, they add unhealthy layers.
The first story is a macabre power game in which a rich man (Dafoe) manipulates a poor man (Plemons) into running over another. The episode hides a curious fetishism with objects from sports myths. In the second, the atmosphere begins to deteriorate when a woman (Stone) returns to her house after having gone through an extreme survival experience. She and her partner (Plemons) usually meet another couple for dinner and sex, but he, who suspects something strange in his wife’s attitude since he returned, begins to ask her to mutilate herself to prove her love. her. The third story is about a cult, with its guru (Dafoe) with the right of stay and a fanatic (Stone) in search of a young woman for a mission that is also macabre. Anyway, the plots don’t matter a little, the film circulates installed in permanent unease, something that exhausts as much as its cynicism. Stone and, above all, a magnificent Plemons, know how to follow Yanthimos’ lead perfectly and that helps a lot to make the general morbid tone work.
Also, the sophisticated aesthetic of the Greek filmmaker is, without a doubt, absorbing. But deep down, and despite the elegant packaging—the most unforgettable thing is an over-revving purple car driven by Emma Stone—there is nothing so risky, so beastly, or so fun in his new exploration of our oddities. Yes, that humans are the worst, that our soul is dark and unfathomable, that we are poor morons and that faith in humanity is corny and from the past. But that provocation is at this point empty and redundant, so much so that it is neither worth scandalizing nor laughing about.
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