Yorgos Lanthimos, the provocative Greek director who triumphs in Hollywood with cryptic films full of sex and violence | Culture

If Yorgos Lanthimos of Kinetta (2005), his first film considered personal, composed around the representation of sex and violence, cryptic, sordid, with hardly any dialogue, without music and without a clear story, had he been told that two decades later he would be doing practically the same thing and with similar audacity, but in Hollywood, working with stars like Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe, that his films would have left the niche of the green dogs, would be praised not only by the majority of critics but also by the public, and that his works would accumulate 22 nominations for the Oscars and five statuettes, would have had a fit of laughter. With such information, the few spectators of that first approach to cruelty, even before Canine (2009), the title that made him internationally known in festivals and theaters in its original version, they would have been left directly stunned.

This is one of the great virtues of Lanthimos, a 50-year-old Athenian, director of the award-winning The favourite and Poor creatureswhich opens in Spain this Friday Kinds of Kindnesshis latest disturbance, starring Stone, Dafoe and Jesse Plemons: having been faithful to his postulates, his daring, his singularity, his wild power of agitation, changing certain formal aspects along the way, to now return to the essences of language forged in Canine. Evolve being the same. Provoking first a few and then a few more, to end up subjugating everyone with a twisted cinema that does not have to deal with shame. As if Luis Buñuel who went to the United States in 1930 to try to integrate into Hollywood, after causing sensation and horror in France with The Golden Agethey would have given him the opportunity to work freely, with the best performers and the most prestigious professionals in the arts, photography, music and production design, as well as with all the money in the world, and he would have ended up creating works there such as The Exterminating Angel, The criminal life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, Simon of the desert, Viridiana either Beautiful day. Well, that’s what Lanthimos has achieved.

With Kinds of Kindnessmade up of three independent stories of about 55 minutes each, filmed during the stormy digital post-production process of Poor creatures, but written over almost a decade together with its reference co-writer, the also Greek Efthymis Philippou, and performed by the same actors and actresses in different roles – although various winks and rhymes can be found among them – Lanthimos has returned home without having completely left it. Above all, in the staging, with the rigor in the framing and the camera movements of Canine and Alpsand leaving behind its famous wide angles, experienced from the magnificent Lobster and The sacrifice of a sacred deerand they reached the extreme of the plans with the point of view of the peephole of a door in The favourite and poor creatures. A look distorted by lenses that, in his new work, presented last May in Cannes, gives way to the simple internal distortion of his characters. Men and women who must deal with control and violence, with hatred of a conventional life and with the radical excesses of fanaticism.

Contemporary allegories of the human condition that, despite their strangeness, always find parallels in our closest everyday lives: in the horror of gender violence, in sex as a natural impulse and as an almost physiological need, in the family as a false representation of comfort, in home education as a physical and psychological prison from which there is no escape, in submission to any type of power.

In Kinds of Kindness Lanthimos’s usual surrealism appears. His search for a superreality inspired by the absurd. Your meeting of the conscious and the unconscious. Again, with that type of astonishing interpretation with which texts are released as if one were reading the telephone directory, close to Brechtian distancing. A technique already practiced in his Greek films, fabulously understood by the excellent Colin Farrell of The sacrifice of a sacred deerand which Jesse Plemons masters here in the first of the stories, the best of the three, a formidable segment in which the director and his writing partner Philippou reconstruct for contemporary times its Greek origins: that of the classical tragedy in which the gods control everything (here, that boss played by Dafoe who forces, massacres, manipulates, orders and decides), like an adult resurrection of the disturbing teenager played by Barry Keoghan in The sacrifice of a sacred deer.

A play on Greek masks that Lanthimos marks with the decision to have a handful of performers change their roles in each of his three stories; that they are always different while being the same; May they always be the same while being different. Different vestments for similar dramatic frame. “He whom the gods want to destroy, they first drive mad.” The cinema of cruelty of an author who bequeaths a series of everlasting dialogues, perhaps commanded by that “I want you to cut off your finger, maybe your thumb, and cook it for me for dinner”, and a set of indelible images and sensations, accompanied by the atonal music of the Englishman Jerskin Fendrix.

Inspired by him Caligula by Albert Camus, and segmented into episodes, in the manner of The ghost of freedomby Buñuel, Kinds of Kindness It will lead viewers to look at empty swimming pools in a different way. And the most artistically disturbed, as the director himself is, will be stimulated to the point of painful laughter at a couple of moments. Informed and alert audiences who do not mind anything because art is free and must subjugate, even to the point of anger, and who will not stop thinking about it as they leave the theater. A theater in which, by the way, the film will have been placed by a very special distributor: Disney. Lanthimos’ absurdity, as tragedy, and as comedy.

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