kinds of kindness (w&d lanthimos, w. efthimis filippou)

Lanthimos is back, baby! Todo bien con Poor Things, but it didn’t feel like pure Lanthimos, a smart director who knows how to play the long game and not get pigeonholed as one of those insufferably European arty types. All the same, this blog feels more affinity with weirdo Lanthimos, and in Kinds of Kindness, he’s back with a vengeance. We get mind control, reincarnation, and self-mutilation, among other choice cuts in this anthology piece, which is scripted with co-writer, Efthimis Filippou. There’s more than enough surreal meat on these bones. Stone and Plemmons deliver in spades, giving the more arcane philosophical elements of the film a consistently plausible human root. The script delivers, not least Stone’s monologue when she talks about dog-world, dialogue which is echoed in some of the smart cut-aways, not to mention Stone’s abuse of a stray dog in the film’s third chapter. The animal elements lend the film a Rilkean dimension: humans are shown to be naive, befuddled, cruel, desperate, in contrast to the more straightforward world of the animals. The ensemble use of the same cast across the three stories adds another playful dimension, reminiscent of Buñuel. What is the film actually about and how might this tie in with its cryptic title? I guess it’s about what it means to be human in this day and age, the desperate need to belong to a tribe in a world where fools are lauded as kings or queens. 

dogtooth (d. giorgos lanthimos, w. lanthimos & efthymis filippou)

The Dogtooth - do you possess one? Are you likely to lose it at any point? If you do have one and circumstances demanded you had to remove it, how would you do it?

I don't know how the word Dogtooth sounds in Greek, but it sounds perfect in English. The writers of this film have as creative an attitude towards language as they do towards familial perversity. Levi Strauss wrote about the controlling power of language, and the way in which the deranged parents control and distort every day vocabulary offers an immediate insight into how power and information are intrinsically connected. In the parents' world, a zombie becomes a little yellow flower. A cat is a killer. The every day is laced with poison.

This is a beautifully conceived and observed film. No explanation is ever offered for the parents' need to manipulate their children. The conscientious father, played with a furrowed brow by Christos Stergioglou, and his wife have created a terrifying kind of Eden, which is observed with comical attention. Like all Edens, the seeds of its destruction are lurking, but having established the logic of this world, the film succeeds in convincing us that there's no reason why the children should not have bought into it.

Whilst it could have dwindled into becoming an exercise in post modern cleverness (ie How many ways can we reinvent our world?), the persistent threat of violence and fear lend a tension to proceedings. Furthermore, in her coming to terms with her relationship to her dogtooth, the older daughter acquires a terrible heroism, worthy of any Russell Crowe movie, and the film emerges as an eloquent testament to humanity's intractable quest for independence.

In the one interview I've seen online with Lanthimos, he talked about a whole community of Greek filmmakers, also mentioning that the film had, at the time of the interview, not succeeded in obtaining a release in his own country. Assuming the country survives into next week, it will be fascinating to see what else emerges in the wake of this remarkable piece of filmmaking.