The sounds of Eurhythmics appear early on in Yorgos Lanthimos’ anthology-film “Kinds of Kindness”, the seductive sounds of 1980s pop-perfection that serve as a complicated promise of the film to come. Lanthimos is a filmmaker who loves to unsettle and misdirect his audience, so those familiar with his work might already anticipate that the music might be a trick, except beyond the gyrating beats there doesn’t seem to be much hidden in the lyrics and their promise that: “Sweet dreams are made of this, who am I to disagree?”.
The sheer abandon of the music is at odds with the repressed man we will soon meet. Robert Fletcher (Jesse Plemmons) is the kind of straitlaced and serious man who we would not imagine gyrating to British synth-pop. By the time we leave him, though, the songs’ observations on the kinds of people in the world feel potent: “Some of them want to use you, some of them want to get used by you…”
Notes of desperation keep escalating as we move further and further into the complicated climaxes of “Kinds of Kindness”. In each of the unrelated stories, Lanthimos (and his co-writer Efthimis Filippou) transport audiences through stories of very lonely people, pushing themselves to unsettling limits all in search of love. Or acceptance. Or belonging. Or some illusion of all three. It’s hard to be sure if the dark humour cutting through the ostensibly mundane human interactions in “Kinds of Kindnesses” is laughing with or at the characters, but by the time the inevitably heighted chaos of the final story falls into space, the aching sadness beneath the absurdity feels too sharp to ignore.
Over his last two films, Lanthimos directed Emma Stone in Tony McNamara screenplays about the complicated relationship between love and power. Although both McNamara and the period-costume sensibilities are absent, Stone and complicated relationships between and love and power are still evident in “Kinds of Kindness”, though illusions of love here are even less potent than in the previous two films. In the first, a repressed man finds himself in an exploitative relationship with his boss. In the second, a police officer fears his wife, who has returned after being missing for weeks, is an imposter and in the third, a man and a woman search for a woman who could be a miraculous figure for their community. Those descriptors are deliberately vague. A large part of the strange allure of “Kinds of Kindness” is watching how each successive film opts to conceal and then reveal what makes the seeming normal people in its stories increasingly unusual as the film goes on.
The world of “Kinds of Kindness” is a bleak one. It is one where a man begs his abuser to ruin his life, and a woman performs physical harm to convince a loved one of her honour. And, yet, it is one that I found strangely moving. It might be easy to mistake the bleakness all around this world as signs of a filmmaker who looks at his characters, and the audience, with ambivalent contempt but even when the world is cruel, the sharpest thing about “Kinds of Kindness” is how Lanthimos helps his actors to find absurd levels of dignity in each undignified action. It’s the kind of cyclical inevitability that the triptych nature of the film benefits from. With the small cast of characters playing wildly different characters in each section, Lanthimos seems to offer both latitude and limits in his vision.
These people are faced to be reformed but in each story their fates are still limited by their limited scope of the world around them. These are desperate people clinging for any semblance of meaning in their life and in the truth of that desperation, “Kind of Kindness” manages to feel weighty enough in each discrete story to be emotionally affecting, but lithe enough in symbol and allusion that the idea of the fable itself is also well-distilled. It’s great that Lanthimos is still discovering new performance nuances in his third film with Stone. Willem Defoe and Hong Chau appear in supporting turns in all sections to make things more interesting, but it is Jesse Plemmons across three impressive turns that gives what might be my favourite male performance in a Lanthimos film. Lanthimos seems like the director who has best made use of Plemmons’ intensity on screen.
How many love stories have required the one doing the loving to cross great limits for love? If you shift the events of either story, just slightly, we might be able to make out a glimmer of something resembling real and true commitment. The foolish actions of the characters could be brave. The blind devotion could be something like aspirational fate. The best trick of “Kinds of Kindness” is that it meets the heightened acts of absurdity its characters put themselves through as if they are the norm. By insisting that the actors play these moments as sincere, makes it easier for us to laugh at first but it’s also what makes them all the more tragic as the films go on. By the end, we might not believe in their insensible actions, but we might begin to realise that their desperation is not that different from ours.
Kinds of Kindness is showing at MovieTowne
