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Tag: kinds of kindness

  • Kinds of Kindness Is More Than Kind of Fucked Up (In All the Best Possible Ways)

    Kinds of Kindness Is More Than Kind of Fucked Up (In All the Best Possible Ways)

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    For those who only just got acquainted with Yorgos Lanthimos because of his star turn at the Academy Awards this year for Poor Things, it would come as no surprise that viewers hoping for “more of the same” might be disappointed by his quick follow-up, Kinds of Kindness. While, sure, both movies are in keeping with Lanthimos’ penchant for “quirky” (a reductive term if ever there was one in terms of describing anything that is “weird”—also usually a reductive term) narratives starring Emma Stone, Kinds of Kindness is distinctly begat of the auteur’s mind. This being in contrast to Poor Things, which was an adaptation of someone else’s work—specifically, Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel of the same name. Presented even more overtly as “a Frankenstein story” in Lanthimos’ hands (though, as some pointed out, it was more like the plot of Frankenhooker, released in 1990), audiences were more easily charmed by this kind of “quirk,” paired with Stone’s rendering of Bella Baxter. Put it this way: Poor Things is the most “Tim Burton” Lanthimos has ever allowed himself to get.

    In truth, Lanthimos’ “return to himself” with Kinds of Kindness seems in part designed to remind people not to get too used to the linear, “easy-to-pinpoint message” of Poor Things. So it is that the film commences with the first story in the “triptych,” where we’re introduced to the unifying thread of each story: R.M.F. (indeed, that was one of the original titles of the movie, apart from the more abstract And). A man who is never given a clear backstory, yet whose shirt and initials will serve as a consistent talisman. In fact, it is R.M.F. (Yorgos Stefanakos) who we first see enter the scene via car while blasting the Eurythmics’ signature 1983 track, “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” (a song that will also serve as another consistent thread in each story). So begins “Vignette #1,” if you will, titled “The Death of R.M.F.” When R.M.F. knocks on the door of the lavish house he’s arrived at, Vivian (Margaret Qualley) answers the door in a silk robe that’s cut as short as it can be without her ass showing (and, in truth, if Qualley had an ass, it would definitely peek out of a robe like that). She takes one look at the shirt he’s wearing, with his initials monogrammed on the breast pocket and tells her husband, Raymond (Willem Dafoe), over the phone exactly what R.M.F. is wearing, including the assurance that his shirt doesn’t look wrinkled. Even so, she still sends a picture of the shirt to prove it (an initial glimpse into Raymond’s fastidious nature).

    R.M.F., we’ll soon find, is the man that Raymond’s emotional whipping boy, Robert (Jesse Plemons), has been tasked with crashing his car into. And why? Simply because Raymond wants him to. Indeed, this particular segment comes across as an allegory for the average employer-employee relationship, with the employer demanding to have total and unbridled control over the person they “own.” For the past ten years, Robert has been only too willing to do whatever Raymond has asked of him—from marrying Sarah (Hong Chau), the woman Raymond “picked out” at the Cheval Bar (where they’re regulars) to lacing her coffee with mifepristone because Raymond doesn’t want Robert to have children (that could be very distracting from work, after all). Thus, the toxicity masquerading as “love” (mainly for all the material things that Raymond provides him with in exchange for Robert’s total lack of autonomy) shines through at its most unignorable when Raymond makes this request. The request for Robert to crash into R.M.F. Of course, Robert has no idea who R.M.F. is, he’s merely told that the man is willing to die (if the crash should happen to be too impactful) for this bizarre exercise in fealty.

    One might say that the entire running motif of Kinds of Kindness is, in fact, fealty. And the lengths that people are willing to go in order to prove it to a toxic “alpha” in the situation. This much is also true in the next “vignette,” “R.M.F. Is Flying” (perhaps an allusion to his limbo state after finally being run over multiple times by Robert in response to Raymond cutting him off cold turkey from his “love”). In this setup, Plemons is now Daniel, a police officer reeling over the recent disappearance of his wife, Liz (Stone), who is some kind of marine biologist lost at sea. Her miraculous return with her fellow researcher, Jonathan (Ja’Quan Monroe-Henderson), is met with joy and relief by their friends, Neil (Mamoudou Athie) and Martha (Qualley), and Liz’s father, George (Dafoe). However, it is less comforting to Daniel when he starts to suspect that the woman who has returned is not his wife at all. Mainly because it’s “little details” about her that aren’t tracking with the “original” Liz. For a start, this Liz is perfectly okay to eat chocolate, a sweet she hated before, and, secondly, because her feet are suddenly slightly too big for all her shoes. When Daniel tells his theory to Sharon (Chau), Jonathan’s wife, she can only stare back at him in disbelief.

    Despite no one believing him, Daniel’s conviction that his wife isn’t really his wife only intensifies, causing him to have an “episode” on the job that leads to his suspension from the force. Still convinced that Liz is someone else, he proceeds to test how devoted she is to him, demanding that she cook her own thumb for him to prove her love (side note: he’s been on a hunger strike against anything she makes for him). When she actually does, he not only says her thumb is disgusting and he would never eat it, but he also then ups the ante by requesting that she cook her own liver for him (talk about a Hannibal Lecter-esque sweet fantasy, or “sweet dream,” to be more Eurythmics-centric). At the end of this petite histoire, the real Liz does show up once Fake Liz ends up killing herself with a self-extraction of the liver to prove her love. What’s the additional message here? Perhaps that “real” love isn’t always that selfless. Otherwise it can get pretty tainted pretty fast.

    And, speaking of “tainted,” that’s what the final “vignette,” “R.M.F. Eats A Sandwich,” is all about. Namely with regard to (sex) cult leaders Omi (Dafoe) and Aka (Chau) insisting on their subjects’ “purity” if they are to be accepted into the, er, fold for fucking. Whenever Omi or Aka hears that one of their “subjects” has broken the bonds of “loyalty” to the cult (which is somewhat ironic considering they’re all fucking multiple people…but hey, so long as it’s within the cult, it’s fine), they have their ways of testing for compromised “purity” (a.k.a. STDs).

    Emily (Stone), a recent convert to the “cause,” seems overly eager to prove herself and her, again, fealty, to Omi and Aka by seeking out a healer that can supposedly reanimate the dead. Which is why the story begins with measuring and weighing the latest “potential” healer, Anna (Hunter Schafer), like she’s a piece of meat. Joining Emily in that task is Andrew (Plemons), a fellow cult member that’s been “assigned” to Emily, as it were, by Omi and Aka. When they try to get Anna to deliver on the final (and most important) test—reviving the dead—she fails…much to Emily’s (in particular) dismay.

    After the disappointment, Andrew and Emily get into her vibrant purple Dodge Challenger and continue on their way, talking to Aka over the phone about whether or not they have enough water for the journey. This rather precise question sets up one of the cruxes of the storyline, which is that, in order to be “pure,” the cult members must only drink water that has been “crafted” out of Omi and Aka’s tears. Ergo, they’re given thermoses filled with this “special” kind of water (a kind of kindness, duh) whenever they hit the road on one of their quests to find the healer. Of course, they’re not flying totally blind. There are certain known criteria about the healer they’re looking for: she’s a woman, she’s a twin, she’s a twin whose other twin died and she has a specific age, height and weight.

    As for Emily’s “former” life before becoming a cultist, she was a mother and a wife to Joseph, portrayed by Joe Alwyn, who takes the chance on playing a role where he “has to” rape in a climate that already has him in “villain mode” thanks to his breakup with Taylor Swift (who, yes, will probably uncomfortably watch this movie and scene since Emma Stone is in her “squad,” as is Jack Antonoff’s wife, Margaret Qualley). Occasionally pulled back to that “old life” of hers out of a sense of, let’s say, wifely and maternal duty, Joseph ends up getting her cast out of the cult when he date rapes her, and Omi, Aka and Andrew immediately find out when they catch her coming out of the house the following morning.

    In the wake of her “affront” to their “cause” (like all cult leaders, that cause is ultimately self-aggrandizement), they drag her to their outdoor “steam room.” A “hot box” is more like it—and one that looks like something out of Midsommar. Cranking the heat up as high as possible to “purify” her, when she is taken out of the box and placed on a perch for Aka to lick sweat off her stomach and see if she’s still “contaminated,” the result is not in Emily’s favor. Shunned from the cult, Emily determines to prove her commitment by finding the healer, once and for all. A quest that, predictably, results in catastrophic circumstances.

    As Kind of Kindness concludes with a mid-credits scene where we finally do see R.M.F. eating that sandwich, the viewer is left to reconcile the idea that maybe blind loyalty is more pathetic than it is noble (see: Republicans and Trump). Something that shouldn’t have to be spelled out for people at this juncture, but, sadly, still needs to be. As a matter of fact, many will likely not get that message because Kinds of Kindness doesn’t spell it out enough for the average feeble mind. And, maybe, in his own meta way, Lanthimos is actually testing the loyalty of his “true” devotees with this film.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Yorgos Lanthimos is Not Your Friend

    Yorgos Lanthimos is Not Your Friend

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    Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Searchlight Pictures

    Last year, Yorgos Lanthimos directed a dark comedy about a woman named Bella who was assembled from the body of an adult and the brain of a fetus in a Frankenstein-like surgery and who went on to fuck her way to self-actualization across a fantastical Europe. It was the most accessible thing the Athens-born director had ever made, which really says more about his overall body of work than it does about Poor Things.

    Lanthimos is one of film’s reigning sadists, though he’s always funny about it — if not funny haha, then funny in a tone so arid as to render the humor borderline subliminal. He makes films set in deadpan universes that sit at Dutch angles to our own and feature characters struggling to live in accordance with arbitrary and frequently cruel conventions. All of which is true of Poor Things as well. What sets it apart is the way that Bella, the wiped-blank heroine played by Emma Stone, rejects the rules and strictures she’s told she has to abide by as she speedruns her way from child to woman of the world. Lanthimos, as unlikely as it seemed, had created a story of empowerment as well as something tailor-made to polarize the internet.

    The frankness of the sexual content — which begins with Bella’s innocent explorations of her own body, progresses to her voracious pursuit of what she calls “furious jumping” with a louche lawyer played by Mark Ruffalo, and eventually brings her to work in a Parisian brothel — kicked off arguments about the degree to which Poor Things is mired in the male gaze. It seemed as though the only person who didn’t care to weigh in on the validity of the film’s feminism was the filmmaker himself, who shied away from the label like someone being introduced as a boyfriend by a person they thought they were just casually dating.

    Watching the world discover Lanthimos by way of one of his least characteristic and, honestly, weakest films has been akin to watching someone you know become the internet’s latest main character, stripped of other context with their actions scrutinized via a very specific lens. Lanthimos is many things — a champion absurdist, an arguable nihilist, an occasional edgelord, and an artist who has maintained a decidedly Euro sensibility despite having worked in English with Hollywood actors since 2015. His movies have the brain-burrowing quality of an insomniac’s thought spiral and are so insistently off-kilter that the Greek Weird Wave, the movement he’s sometimes described as being a part of, feels less like
    a trend in national cinema and more like a summary of how his distinct sensibility has filtered through to some of his peers. If he considers himself a feminist — and there’s no reason to believe he wouldn’t, even if there is a “please clap” quality to Bella’s journey in Poor Things that leaves it lacking in conviction — it has felt largely incidental until this point.

    His work does have an awareness of the role that gender plays in the abuse
    of power and in sexual violence, and his films feature their own fun-house-mirror versions of patriarchy. But when it comes to the degradations his characters are subjected to, he’s equal opportunity. The most challenging aspect of his movies, which run the gamut from the brilliant (Dogtooth, The Favourite) to the irritatingly opaque (Kinetta, The Killing of a Sacred Deer), has more to do with the impassivity of his gaze and the delectable swagger behind it. He skewers his characters like he’s pinning butterflies to corkboard, and it’s not always evident whether that’s done in service of some greater purpose or out of a more basic desire to provoke. Kinds of Kindness, his hilariously hostile follow-up to Poor Things, is a return to the director’s primary interest, which has always been control. In particular, he’s fascinated by what makes people continue to obey, how they fumblingly fit themselves into roles laid out for them, why they might submit to the will of others even when it causes them harm.

    The anthology film, which premiered earlier this year at Cannes, is made up of a trio of surreal fables rife with coercion, druggings, assaults, and self-mutilation. In its first section, Jesse Plemons plays a man who lives his entire life — from the clothes he wears to the house he lives in, the woman he marries, and the size of their family (he puts an abortifacient in his wife’s coffee to maintain their childless state) — according to the dictates of his boss (Willem Dafoe). In the second, Plemons is a cop who subjects a woman (Stone) who claims to be his missing wife to a series of escalating tests in order to prove she’s an impostor. (The ensemble, which includes Joe Alwyn, Mamoudou Athie, Hong Chau, and Margaret Qualley, recurs across each part.) And in the third, Stone belongs to a cult whose members pledge sexual fidelity to its two leaders and are in search of a messiah — a position that involves being able to raise the dead but also having the correct distance between your nipples. Lanthimos has made inroads with American audiences, but Kinds of Kindness brings to mind his earlier and less approachable work, which is in Greek and focuses on the dynamics of people devoted to inscrutable group activities that involve turning yourself over to someone else’s whims.

    There’s also an obsessive cop in Kinetta, Lanthimos’s barely parsable 2005 solo debut, one consumed with coaching a hotel maid and a photoshop clerk through reenactments of violent crimes, a project they keep coming back to despite its appearing to make them miserable. There’s a cultlike collective in his 2011 Alps, a group of four people who, as a service to the bereaved, fill in for people who have died, wearing the deceased’s clothing and parroting past conversations — a process that leads one of its members, played by Lanthimos’s favorite non-American leading lady, Angeliki Papoulia, to become destructively overinvested. These aren’t films about people who overcome limitations and discover themselves but something uneasier: films about people who barely have a sense of self at all and who accept being told what to do because they’re at a loss otherwise.

    It’s fair to say that all of Lanthimos’s movies are meant to be received as comedies, even 2017’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer, which takes on the contours of a thriller when members of a family learn they’re required to sacrifice one of their own. But he isn’t in any way a warm filmmaker, which may have something to do with how so many of the oddball enterprises his characters are involved in read as distorted versions of filmmaking with someone in charge of direction and others playing parts. His characters are unfailingly stilted and juvenile and a little alien, designed to keep the viewer at arm’s length rather than to invite sympathy. Given how regularly his films veer toward debasement, that distance serves as a protective measure, a means of making the ludicrous and disturbing situations he conjures up easier to tolerate.

    The most excruciating sequence in his entire filmography, in 2009’s Dogtooth, rests entirely on the mechanical behavior of its participants. Papoulia, as one of three adult siblings who were raised in stunted isolation, is directed to have sex with her brother by their parents, who have created a whole mythology about the dangers of the outside world but who fully buy into the idea that men have urges that must be tended to. Lanthimos shoots the encounter in a series of frank, static shots that leave nothing to the imagination until the end, when the film cuts to Papoulia’s character in profile, her brother visible only in the reflection of the mirror as he moves above her, her face contorted in an involuntary grimace. This framing is echoed in Kinds of Kindness in a scene in which one of Stone’s characters is roofied and then raped, her head jostling as her unconscious body is assaulted by someone offscreen. These aren’t moments anyone would trumpet as feminist, though what’s upsetting about them isn’t that they feel exploitative — it’s that they’re presented impassively, with no more compassion than prurience and with an unsparing gaze that provides no guidance for what a viewer is supposed to feel aside from discomfort.

    There’s something haunting about how Lanthimos keeps returning to these dynamics. He treats the desire to be dominated as an elemental aspect of human nature, though it’s one he prefers to explore on a granular level. He may not offer empathy to these characters, but he doesn’t hold himself apart from them. If the triumphant found-family ending of Poor Things rings false, that’s only because it provides closure when his efforts are very much ongoing.

    It’s ridiculous to allow the executive you work for to decide what you should read at night and how many children you can have, but it’s worth reflecting on the forces shaping each of our own decisions on those matters. That’s not an especially friendly way to think about how we all exist in the world — but then Yorgos Lanthimos was never your friend.

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    Alison Willmore

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