At the Sydney Film Festival and now The Current Cinema - Janice Tong's short take on KINDS OF KINDNESS (Yorgos Lanthimos, Ireland/UK/USA, 2024)

 

Emma Stone, Yorgos Lanthimos

Yorgos Lanthimos’ ‘triptych fable’ as it is described in its press kit is all but a well funded (you can tell by the way it’s filmed and it’s mise en scène) farcical romp that lacks the kind of abstract ‘weirdness’ (another oft used word associated with the film) Lynchian cinephiles so love. It matters little that it’s broken out into 3 stories, the 2 hour 45 mins screening time was at best, unpleasant, but overall, on the far side of inducing tedious boredom.

 

Perhaps..  as the second film I watched on the same night, immediately following Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s 3 hours 17 mins, About Dry Grasses meant I had little tolerance for anything less-than-brilliant held true. 

 

With Kinds of Kindness, Lanthimos has moved away from his earlier masterpieces like Dogtooth (2009) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017. They offered us a kind of darkly tragic Euripidic-Sophoclean take on life. 

Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe

Instead, Lanthimos is following his Poor Things (2023) trajectory of installing us in a mind-numbing and meaningless simulacrum — a sort of dystopian Disneyland (as if the real thing is not frightening enough). Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe reunite here, three times, across three stories, each playing different characters, but are all simulacra of their previous selves – this was intended on the part of the director and his co-writer, Ehimis Filippou. Filippou and Lanthimos wanted the three stories and their characters to inhabit the same universe, but they are not woven as interconnecting narratives, in fact, the three stories are only linked by the initial that is common to all three titles: the R.M.F of The Death of R.M.F; R.M.F. is Flying and R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich. No, we don’t get to find out what R.M.F. stands for, but we do see these initials embroidered on a shirt of a man in the first story.

 

In The Death of R.M.F, Jesse Plemons, who won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival this year for this role, plays a middle aged corporate type, whose sole occupation in life is to keep his boss (Dafoe) happy…sure he is not all that obedient because he takes small liberties by acting against instructions (like wearing his own choice of clothes for the day) or lying about what he’s has or hasn’t done. But this wasn’t a problem until his position was ousted by a more obedient pawn (Stone). Whereas in R.M.F. is Flying, Plemons is a dedicated husband whose wife (Stone), a marine biologist who returns home from being lost at sea for many months. But he soon suspects that she is not who she says she is. Lastly, in R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich, Plemons is paired with Stone as a kind of bounty hunter in search of a particular person – a surviving twin who has the miraculous ability to heal. Folks, if you’re wanting to see the dance scene in the motel parking lot (b, you’ll have to wait until the last 10 mins of the film. Or, just YouTube it.

 

 

 

Perhaps a good way to describe the film is as an alt-fiction piece, where the whole world has become overrun by cults, and these three stories are just examples of power and the desire of people wanting to control other people (kind of like a magnified version of social media); the smacker is the other’s blind willingness to be controlled. Boy, the lengths in which a person would go to in order to submit to the other’s power is excruciatingly banal. Sadly, I cannot see this film as a play on anything psychological like the Stockholm Syndrome or attuned to a philosophical idea like that of ‘the bull is nothing without its matador’ (Cixous), it's ‘weirdness’ is really just plain sad and not satire…In the session I attended, there was a lot of laughter from the audience, and usually at unexpected moments in the film. I guess they were a mix of uncomfortable sniggers and genuine chortles of disbelief. I doubt if anyone laughed in the same way at a screening of Mulholland Drive.

 

All in all, I found this to be a difficult film to like even though it’s well made. 

 

The 71st Sydney Film Festival screened from 5 to16 June 2024.