2024-09-16 08:02:28
The American actor and king of weirdos Jesse Plemons got three roles from the master of film provocations Yorgos Lanthimos. The short-story triptych Dear Kindness, which Czech cinemas will start screening on Thursday, was created during the demanding finishing works of the author’s previous film The Poor. In it, the Greek director once again puts the protagonists in absurd situations. They are quite different from ordinary life.
In the first of the stories, Jesse Plemons plays a man for whom his boss, played by Willem Dafoe, plans not only his job, but his entire life. From actions such as which wine to choose in a restaurant to the partner with whom he has been living for years, to actions far exceeding the boundaries of law and morality. The other stories also deal with manipulation and control, often erotically motivated.
Yorgos Lanthimos continues his older Greek films Špičák or Alpy. And again, he troubles both his heroes and the audience. In his early works, the leading creator of the so-called strange Greek wave bound the characters with sets of rules: in Špičák, the father created a fictional reality for his children, in the Alps, the members of the group that gave the project its name bound themselves in a similarly unconventional order.
The artist collaborated again with his co-screenwriter at the time, Efthymis Filippou, on the novel Milá laskavosti. And after the more playful, stylized, satirical and more genre-oriented films Favoritka or Chudáčci, the Greek provocateur returns to his earlier poetics. Even in the backdrop of an American big city.
Dafoe, Plemons and with them also the actress Emma Stone – who won an Oscar for Poor Girls – are each transformed into three characters who experience special types of nightmares. In the second story, Plemons is a policeman whose wife has gone missing. But when they find her, she is not only malnourished and slightly injured. Above all, the hero begins to suspect that it is not her at all. In the last story, the cult members are looking for a woman with the ability to revive the dead. They literally walk over corpses in the process.
Lanthimos’ images have always stood out for their ability to present striking, fairly abstract concepts filled with not only potentially shocking scenes, but also general reflections on human nature.
Emma Stone stars in Yorgos Lanthimos’ third film. | Photo: Atsushi Nishijima
He wasn’t always able to keep those concepts alive all the time. In the novel, it was as if he had only one strong opening idea in each of the stories, and he relied on the fact that, in a shorter short story, he could play everything on the atmosphere, the increasing intensity and the sequence of situations that force the characters to take increasingly radical steps. It comes out rather half-assed.
Like many good sci-fi stories, or even episodes of the satirical sci-fi series Black Mirror, Lanthimos’ stories can also bring the audience to not only mild shock. Not only over the fact that, for example, one character cuts his finger, but above all for them to ask different questions. What forms of manipulation and violence are we currently watching? Where does the boundary of reality end? Does the hero suffer from a mental disorder, or has he found himself in the middle of deliberate manipulation?
These are relatively familiar motifs, but Lanthimos benefits from the actors’ ability to be unreadable in their roles. Plemons, Dafoe and Emma Stone provoke, unsettle and surprise mainly because there are actually no positive characters, only strange webs of toxic and otherwise problematic relationships.
The Greek author has been exploring the perverse nature of interpersonal coexistence for a long time. His protagonists long to be recognized or loved, and will do anything for it.
The creator may vary or recycle his old motifs, and someone could brush his new stories off the table as just slightly more eccentric, more violent, more far-fetched and better-directed episodes of the Frontiers type series from the 90s of the last century.
After the audience-appreciated, fantastic, visually intoxicating Poor People, Yorgos Lanthimos does a lot to irritate the audience. He is suddenly “artistically” detached, he is not afraid of protruding insides and other unpleasant bodily scenes, even though he does not sneer at them in any way and offers them in moderate pictorial compositions.
But Lanthimos is also able to question not only the connections between the characters, but also the nature of the world in which everything takes place. It is probably a contemporary, essentially anonymous American metropolis, but sometimes it seems as if it were some kind of artificial reality, a strange experimental terrarium, which is not only explored, but also controlled by very sly “puppeteers” moving their heroes.
Are there really man-made doppelgangers? Can anyone revive the dead? Although similar questions end with a simple uneasiness, which does not allow dividing the characters into positive, negative, or healthy and mentally ill. But thanks to the execution, Lanthimos manages to be a fairly effective executioner of the audience’s experiences – which is not a criticism, but rather his obvious intention.
This pilgrimage through civilizational neuroses, fueled by science fiction and horror moments, is rather a minor protest in the career of a filmmaker who, despite the unwelcoming nature of his early Greek films, is experiencing solid Hollywood and festival success. Now he has decided to torture his American actors as he once did their much lesser known Greek counterparts.
Film
Kind favors
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
Falcon, Czech premiere on September 12.