Bertolucci is great, but is Lanthimos greater?

I watched “London Boulevard” (2010, William Monahan) last night, initially looking into the work David Thewlis has done, after he had fascinated me as a pianist in Besieged (1998, L'assedio, original title; aka: “Shanduraï”, Bernardo Bertolucci). Turns out he’s been in lots of films I have already seen and played roles I admired. That’s the sign of a good actor! Under the radar of type-casting. In effect, one who is not pretending to pretend by any method, but delivering a quality unique to the character but common to us all. It is not always easy to identify with everyone, but film makes for an opportunity when you might try.

It's a violent life

Anyway, after the grim film, which leaves no room for happy endings, I caught myself perplexed, muttering, “is this level of violence really going on in London?!” Instantly, I could answer my own inquiry in the affirmative. Even at 18, back in the late 80’s, and even if I could not exactly know how deep the criminal network went, I experienced how widely spread it was and how you inevitably touched upon it when you hung out with people who (fairly) innocently smoked pot (towards which there was a zero tolerance in the UK).

It's a masquerade

I accompanied the unsteady (the effects of hashish taken with yoghurt seems to last forever) and the outrageous (gorgeous blue-black Africans six and a half feet tall and shining in leather, from glossed head to steel-capped toe) down into the most perverse and lascivious depths. Or more troubling to me still, there was endless roaming and languishing in the no-man's marshlands of the rigorously bored. There were weird and creepy characters amongst them, straight out of an adult and psychedlic remake of Alice and Wonderland; but there was also a level of depravity and inflammability like in one of the most horrifying movies I know, "Irréversible" (2002, Gaspar Noé).

Far from beguiled by them, I didn't outrightly condemn the young trend-setters for their arrogant self-confidence and experimental nature, doing dangerous stuff and behaving illicitly. Most of them didn't seem very smart or excellent to me (low on "arete", or the Greek term for virtue, so to say) but I had a margin of respect for how they sought to be alive, or at least make some kind of move into life, even if it distorted them grotesquely and made them croak the most banal delusions from their bloated egos.

Born to be bad

In "The Brooklyn Follies", Paul Auster's character examines why it pays off to be degenerate and how come the bad guys seem to pull it off. Why does God not punish the mean and murderous? The contrary seems to take place: a kind of elevation for the most energetic. Look at the wiley, envious Jacob gaining favour over the good but sappy Esau. The reasoning has to be, that it takes an especially vibrant spirit to lead a people and this gusto is to be found in the ruthless-survivor mind. The fight to come out on top, as directed by God, has to make natural selection (or God) lean towards the criminal. If not a flawed plan, we must say in the criminal resides our genius. As in the mad (what demi-gods must the criminally insane then be!).

Crime is rooted in misfits

It is why, possibly, it is often argued by the humanists amongst us, putting criminals away behind bars, secluding them in an exile status from society, breeds bigger and better criminals.

What I found really disturbing, I concluded, in response to "London Boulevard" was the way it struck a chord with me. I could see how easily one could become a Mitchel (Colin Farrell). One step of self-assertion leads to the next....before you know it fate catches up with you. And how many Charlottes (the villified celebrity on the verge of a nervous breakdown) and Brionys (the lost-cause sister struggling with addiction) we don't all know together, right? If only from tabloids (the former) or from a friend of a friend (in the case of the latter).

The Thewlis eccentric (and not so innocent) companion of the celeb and the Ray Winstone (Gant) seriously deranged psychopath are maybe of another order, and either farther out on the fringe of society or on a level deeper in the underground circuit, depending on how you want to see it; still, it is but a small step from a Mitchell to a Gant....it takes only one pedophile in childhood to give the little shove that lands you up several tiers lower down on the hopelessly evil scale.

The Relief

Another word for aid. A little help from your friends. Friends, thick as thieves, bands of robbers, is all you have but there is noone you can ever trust on the boulevard.
What can I say about the moment of relief the protagonist finds in his lover's arms? Both he and the celebrity actress/model know a moment of solace, comfort, hope maybe even (but only fleeting and never of the transformative kind). What but love can hold out the hand to pull the other back onto higher ground? But what when you can't escape crime? You're a misfit afterall.

Drama uncovers truths

I found myself taking pointers from Mitchel’s demeanor. A man with a plan. Not deterred. Committed to his sense of preserving right from wrong. Sticking to your guns sometimes requires taking rather firm measures, apparently. Don't expect it to pay off. Do you ever score any debts, anyway? To society? God? Yourself? You end up as poor as you were born. Or as rich? Returned to noone but yourself, in any case.

Moral Compass

I was getting into the mood for learning from this Mitchel, or was it Farrell, or maybe even the director. The writer? The city London itself?

I started to recall, now, the film “The Lobster” by Yorgos Lanthimos, in which Colin Farrell also stars. A brilliant film, not quite absurdist nor existentialist, vaguely familiar however surreal; painting an equally unsafe world, in which you are expected to abide by randomly invented rules. How to live in an oppressive atmosphere of absolutist morals you cannot feel coming from an inner fount of wisdom? You start to feel the codes of conduct and the little concordance there is between hearts in your own life.

I could relate to how the characters were trying to escape the inane System, without delusions and with little hope of escape at all. This Lanthimos is hitting on a modern way to display karma at work: just like in the ancient Greek tragedies, where the old has to work itself out dramatically, narratively, usually catastrophically besides, before new beginnings are possible.

In such, oppressive worlds, the harrowing motif is one of a collective consciousness in need of regeneration; but how to act when the time has come for concrete moves? It is only getting harder as each individual must learn to choose what is best for them and each individual is of value to a larger unit. Nobody is left uncounted for anymore, is the modern aim. This gives complex interactive networks but opportunists will move towards the quiet perimiter to form new totalitarian hubs (of maffiosi).

The following morning

One thing soon lead to another, when I checked what else Colin had been up to recently or what I might have missed, dismissing him in his more bawdy years as a Hollywood star rather than an actor with pluck and weight. Sure enough, “The Killing of A Sacred Deer” pops up, which turns out to be another freaky trip by the same aforementioned director.

Utterly unnerving stuff, that kept me on the edge of my seat, with a heavy Greek Myth and Tragedy vibe despite its current day setting: rational, conservative, emotionally repressed alternated by less sophisticated but no more forgiveably akward behaviours by the lesser-to-do. The karmic motif here is blame and how to attone for it. Why do we seek vengeance or retribution or sue for damages? Instead of forgiving as an act of mercy?

At first, I was undecided who of the stifling characters I was being suffocated by the most. The sense of claustrophobia (everybody locked up in their own selfish minds) was superbly pronounced by a "staging" of the dialogue (underwriting the dualistic tension that must be relieved by a climactic outcome; also mimicking the robotic interactions we have with eachother). Since this is my thing, I personally felt there to be stereotypical undertones of Autism in the manner of communication. If nothing else it emphasises how autiform the times we live in are. This compounds towards the creation of our torturous dungeons in our heads.

I note also how Lanthimos tends to keep the camera very dynamic, allowing us to move in and out while the sets and action is sparse and stiff (even paralysed...); often he lifts us way above the actor, and we are looking down (following rather than having him come towards us) like the Olympian God would have back in the day, tut-tutting in dismay.

• Read this for more help on how to interpret "The Killing of A Sacred Deer"(some background on Euripides's tragedy of Iphegenia, but also Wyeth's desolate painting "Christina's World" served as inspiriational theme.)

More Bitter Fates Where This Came From:

Yorgos Lanthimos’s list of masterful windows on the insanity of human psychology goes on, and for a flavour of his work, here follow a few broad descriptions of the plot lines he has developed (all taken from IMBD):

• “A group of people start a business where they impersonate the recently deceased in order to help their clients through the grieving process.” (Alps; 2011)
• “In a dystopian near future, single people, according to the laws of The City, are taken to The Hotel, where they are obliged to find a romantic partner in forty-five days or are transformed into beasts and sent off into The Woods.” (The Lobster; 2015)
• “Three teenagers live isolated, without leaving their house, because their over-protective parents say they can only leave when their dogtooth falls out.” (Dogtooth; 2009)
• “At a Greek hotel in the off-season, a chambermaid, a man obsessed with BMW cars, and a photo-store clerk attempt to film and photograph various badly re-enacted struggles between a man and a woman.” (Kinetta; 2005)

My Next Watch

A Yorgos Lanthimos I have yet to get hold of. Had missed this title coming out, altogether. Colman and Weisz? What can make this anything but worth watching!