One of the simple, but great, joys of the Cannes Film Festival is throwing off your formalwear and changing back into your regular clothes. Relaxation is instant; everything feels suddenly easier. Perhaps that is how the director Yorgos Lanthimos felt after wrapping his ornate, Oscar-winning bildungsroman epic Poor Things and then tucking into his new film Kinds of Kindness, which premiered at Cannes on May 17.
The film is a return to Lanthimos’s smaller-scale style, the blunt chilliness that first made him famous. Kinds of Kindness shares the same DNA as Dogtooth or Killing of a Sacred Deer, morbid little tales that verge on outright nihilism. In Kinds of Kindness, Lanthimos and co-screenwriter Efthimis Filippou stage three short stories about people desperately trying to regain control of their lives—dark and strange as those lives may have been before twists of fate came calling.
As was also true of Lanthimos’s earlier work, Kinds of Kindness risks alienation. Each story ends on a note of puckish discordancy that could be read as a middle finger to the audience, or empty provocation. Those hoping for some sense of grand meaning—or, really, any kind of explanation of what’s going on—are denied. Kinds of Kindness is clever and a bit snide, a curio cabinet not designed for beauty.
The first section, called “The Death of R.M.F.,” features Jesse Plemons—whose dry deadpan is a natural fit for Lanthimos and Filippou’s writing—as Robert, a corporate drone of some variety who has an unnerving devotion to his boss, Raymond (Willem Dafoe, having a good time). Robert has regimented his life to the letter of Raymond’s instruction—he gains weight to please Raymond; he has sex with his wife (Hong Chau) when he’s told to; he’s even willing to crash his car, risking his life and that of the stranger who’s been paid to be T-boned in his BMW. Why Raymond wants any of this done is never illuminated. All we really understand is that there’s something psychosexual happening between Robert, Raymond, and Raymond’s wife, played by Margaret Qualley.
Maybe this is a metaphor for those who forsake their autonomy (and morality) to please the gods of capitalism, who secure for themselves a comfortable and upwardly mobile life at the cost of their own pleasure and the well-being of others. Or maybe there’s no commentary here and Lanthimos just wanted to noodle around with Plemons and Dafoe, a perfectly reasonable justification for doing anything.
The second story, “R.M.F. Is Flying,” is the most elusive, concerning a man (Plemons) longing for his missing wife (Emma Stone) but not liking who eventually returns. There are clever moments throughout “Flying”— most notably a very funny, if slightly obvious, sex joke—but Lanthimos tries patience as he meanders into ever more inscrutable territory. Opacity is all well and good; weirdness for weirdness’s sake has been the intention behind many great works of art. Too often in “Flying,” though, one feels that Lanthimos is simply poking at us just to get an annoyed reaction. The bit gets dull pretty quickly.