One of the routines of international cinema It consists of the discovery by authors, many times, of the glorification of a name that later, because time is the best arbiter, becomes part of the dictionaries and is forgotten by the majority of viewers. Not necessarily, let’s clarify, that is justice: we could fill pages with valuable filmmakers who are only in textbooks.
The question today, with the Oscar nominations in hand, is whether or not posterity will remember the Greek Yorgos Lanthimosthe director who can snatch the elusive award from Christopher Nolan, favorite for “Oppenheimer”. Lanthimos, the reader knows, has released “Poor Creatures”a remarkable film (we’ll see if that term is a compliment) based on the novel by Scotsman Alasdair Gray and that it is both a perverse fairy tale, an underlined allegory, a work of design, a pamphlet, a fantasy comedy or a manual on how to read the world.
Biography of a director
Yorgos Lanthimos He is fifty years old. He released his first short film in 1975. He did – and it shows – a lot of advertising and a lot of video clips. He directed his first feature in 2001, “My best friend”, together with Lakis Lazopoulosbut he became known with his first solo film, “Canino”, from 2009. And here things begin to go well for “don” Lanthimos. “Canine” It was awarded in the “Un certain regard” section of the Cannes Festival, began to circulate on the international circuit and forged a name for the director who was already quite well known professionally, but not for the public. All of Lanthimos is in that film, which had a commercial release in Argentina. In principle, it is the story of a family that does not let its children leave their house. Never. The children are three young people (the eldest is an adult male with two younger sisters), treated in a childish manner. A repressive father and an accommodating mother have created a completely false world for them: they believe that Frank Sinatra is their grandfather, they take out their sexual impulses with a colleague that the father (in charge of security at a factory) brings to their house and they have told them that they can only go to the outside world when just one of their canines falls out. There is some Buñuel and some surrealism, a lot of sex without eroticism and a constant allegorical commentary on family and institutions. But above all it is a “strange” film, although with less convoluted shots than in his later work. Black humor, of course, but with a “message”. Conclusion: He knows how to set the camera and create annoying moments (that’s a compliment) but his vision of his world is quite simple. Ah! the family.
The next movie is “The Lobster”. As happens when a director receives applause and good sales, Lanthimos obtained international financing and stars: the protagonists are Colin Farrell -almost all the time on screen- and Rachel Weisz -who would later repeat with the director. Here we are in a more fantastical film: singles must go to a certain hotel and find a partner in 45 days, or they will be transformed into an animal. Of course there are resisters to this order of things and the hero (anti, actually) tries it a couple of times with women, each more absurd and cruel, until he escapes, joins the resistance and is also disenchanted by it. His look at the consumer society, propaganda and politics seem like a discourse anchored in the seventies, while the way of filming and the humor have that ironic disenchantment closer to the sensitivity of a world where everyone can build , virtuality through, its own environment. It continues with its demolition of social relationships, especially couples and families. But when he appeals to fantasy, some truth escapes – probably this is not intentional – that breaks the hyper control of the staging a little. Because yes, Lanthimos is a guy who seems to control every bit of the picture. For better and for worse, by the way.
But controlled rarity, generous budgets, well-known actors and Hollywood distribution (those things it does to add prestige) are enough. His subsequent film continues in the same vein. “The Sacrifice of the Sacred Deer” is much harsher: it involves an act of justice in which a man must kill someone in his family to prevent everyone from dying. Once again the protagonist, in the same vein as “The Lobster” but much more desperate, is Farrell, co-starring Nicole Kidman. The fixation with the absurdity of the family extends to the short “Nimic,” filmed in Mexico and starring Matt Dillon.
In 2018 it arrives “The favourite”which gives him multiple Oscar nominations and an award for Olivia Colman, who plays Queen Anne Stuart. Here’s something funnier: the complex relationship – sexual too – between the queen who united Britain with her old favorite (Rachel Weisz) and a new one (Emma Stone), which involves a triple power play. It is a much more interesting film than the previous ones, where the fantastic is elsewhere: the director’s gaze, as if what he was portraying was happening on another planet. That explains the “fish-eye” lens that distorts everything, the forced perspectives, the unnaturalistic gestures of the characters. For once, it seemed that Lanthimos had found a way to tell the world uncontaminated by convictions that were too trivial and, let’s face it, ancient.
The creature from “Poor Things”
And then, in the year of “Barbie”, the story of a doll that discovers Humanity; appears “Poor Creatures”, story of a doll (made of flesh) that discovers Humanity. Only based on a cult novel with the same title and not on an industrial toy, of course. Anyway, let’s leave the simile aside and see: the book of Alasdair Gray (a very original author, illustrator of his own work, always somewhere between fantasy and allegory) is a kind of reversal of the myth of Frankenstein. But it is also her refutation: the story of Bella Baxter, told by her husband, is that of a suicide whose body receives the brain of her own unborn baby, by a brilliant and somewhat deformed scientist; that she seduces men with a gigantic sexual appetite and that she knows the realities of the world. It is satire (which is what Lanthimos exercises), with a lot of sex (which abounds in Lanthimos’ films) and social allegory (bingo). The film works, above all, on the fantasy and artificial aspect of the book while highlighting themes such as the role of women, the pressure of men, the misery of the world and much more. However, it is Lanthimos’ only “optimistic” film and one believes that, despite the underlining of much of what is said, there is “something” there.
But Lanthimos is also, and above all, a diagnosis of today’s “auteur” cinema: cutting-edge technology, cynicism and deep themes. In the moments when the three things hit us in the eyes, the Greek becomes a fake. But it is undeniable that he achieves notable moments of invention. Is he then someone who seeks, like the helpless children who overpopulate his films, a cinema “dad” who applauds him and then says what everyone wants to hear? Or is there something worthwhile there, the seed of something interesting? The reader can decide for himself, but we remind him that Yorgos Lanthimos, the fashionable weirdo, is already in his fifties. Perhaps he is just a commercially successful “dilettante.”
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