Kinds of Kindness (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2024)

[therewillbeblus]

The second story made more sense to me this time

Spoiler

Sparked by a disruption to the working order of a relationship, one party cannot bring himself to accept inconsistencies in behavior, while the other firmly accepts all inconsistencies in their partner's behavior. They both cope in the most respectably absurd ways possible, but there's an undercurrent of relatability: One person is pushing the other away, convincing himself of no affinity, as a form of self-protection against the possibility of change unwitnessed by him, her partner. The other is desperate for security, and elastically finds a portion of this in the mere presence of a familiar being, not understanding the change in him but disbelieving it's existence by reframing his role as sturdy. "He's always been there for me" in the past becomes conflated with predictable behavior in the present, and without another resource for stability, she follows that broken lighthouse because she knows it is - functional or not - a lighthouse.

I guess it's a study in black-and-white thinking as a defense mechanism in relationships, particularly when pieces of the foundation are removed, yielding an unsettling reminder of how fragile that can be. And then of course, the absurdity of what we'll do. Stone's actions are loud, but Plemons slowly turning into a hungry cannibal for anyone other than his "alien" wife's flesh is a fun metaphor.

[pianocrash]

Anyone else having a pretty good time, then find the third episode a bit of a mess and a drag?

I was on the fence about the whole film up until this point, and Stone's performance humanized the entirety because of it.

Spoiler

I know people mention Lynch so often with Lanthimos, but I've always felt his material is moreso a Twilight Zone approach with little redemptive resolution. His outlook on the sexual act on the whole is utterly horrifying, desperate, and possibly the most human of any other popular filmmaker (it doesn't help that sex is seemingly such taboo a subject for most America-centric filmmakers/studios/the public at large, but it's also a pretty terrifying time to be alive and possess sexuality in any capacity). We're all wild dogs fighting for a cheeseburger or a group to run with, or else a snake coiling into a teacup in the rain for a drink (no actual snakes in this picture, but you get the drift). Also, we sometimes have sex and die, pretty often, but can also enrich each other's puny existence and sometimes come back to life.

While this wasn't the reheated Haneke of Killing Of A Sacred Deer or as linearly perfect & dazzling as Poor Things, it was more Full Frontal than Schizopolis, for better or worse. The needle drops were endlessly silly (same with Jerskin Fendrix "Man Behind Piano At Bar"'s dun dun dun score), and is maybe the best case argument for absolutely no music to be used in films ever again. But I fear that deletion would have made this film ostensibly weirder, funnier, and even more confusing to whoever happened to catch it. I did love that all the fast n' shiny cars showcased felt like that one episode of Breaking Bad when Walt buys a Dodge Challenger, because it's absolutely incongruous and deliciously stupid because, in this universe, why not? You cannot be a genius always.

[domino harvey]

Blu-Ray/DVD combo on Oct 8 (with deleted scenes, in case you wished this was longer) - glad Lanthimos is still able to get Searchlight to release films physically

[therewillbeblus]

Looks like the deleted scenes are minimal, listed as

Spoiler

-Robert ignores the SatNav
-Liz isn’t recognised

[jwo17]

Blu-Ray/DVD combo on Oct 8 (with deleted scenes, in case you wished this was longer) - glad Lanthimos is still able to get Searchlight to release films physically

I believe all of Searchlight’s theatrical releases receive disc treatment downstream. IIRC, the only recent outlier was All Of Us Strangers going to Criterion because I heard that title was originally set to streaming so the initial deal structure didn’t support a proprietary physical release. Are there others I’m missing?

[domino harvey]

A Lacanian reading of the film - didn’t get very far because he drops a big spoiler like a minute in (sooooo… spoiler alert), but I like his other videos doing close readings of philosophy texts

Now that I can watch the whole thing, I thought this was a terrific reading!

The Narrator Returns said upthread that only one of the three segments had a "complete thought" and I'm not sure I'd fully agree but I was reminded more than once during this film of both their line and an off the cuff moment on Mitch Hedberg's first comedy album: After delivering a bit that didn't land with the audience, Hedberg chuckles to himself and admits, "That wasn't a complete joke." I think all three of these, to degrees, aren't complete stories, but extended itches not fully scratched. Whether that's commendable or regrettable is debatable, but I think it's indicative of this being an unfinished work by design.

The first and third segments, despite deliberate elisions, have a conventional set up and pay off. But the first must still shoulder symbolic readings because its depicted reality could not exist in anything approaching our world of narrative plausibility, and this tendency is then taken to unsatisfying extremes by the second segment, which juggles awkward bursts of violence and sexuality with a series of scenes that don't quite build on each other so much as contradict and complicate what we think we know. This second segment is simultaneously the least successful and most interesting segment, perhaps because of this divide, perhaps because it is a couple steps removed from any possible "solvable" answer and yet we can't help but try to conjure a narrative to make it make sense. And then finally the third segment gives us a group doing exactly that, seeking out an answer with incredible specific perimeters and somewhat less clear means of arriving on them. And that meaning-making is all we're left with at the end. This is a playful waste of time as a film, but as an invitation and a dare to an audience to get it to add up, well... I can't deny I'm already enjoying it more while thinking it over than I did watching it play out. And if nothing else, this is the most bizarre film to receive wide release in recent memory, so hats off to Lanthimos pulling that off!