In The Favourite, women’s bonds with each other move the gears of history as much as the political manoeuvres of menīy contrast, The Favourite is less troubling than mischievous, although it too is dark, as well as very moving. Its follow-up, The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), is an unforgivingly bleak, bloody revenge drama infused with classical mythology – and in which characters keep having long, farcically mundane discussions about wristwatches. Lanthimos’s first English-language film, The Lobster (2015), which proved a significant art-house hit, is set in a world where single people must find partners or be transformed into animals. In this brutal but grimly comic piece, a despotic father keeps his adult children imprisoned at home and systematically misinformed about the outside world and the meanings of everyday words. Since his extraordinary second feature, Dogtooth (2009), Lanthimos has been notorious for a wild imagination and a sometimes aggressive form of absurdism. I thought: it’s not going to be film-making, but it’s going to be close.”Īs things turned out, Lanthimos ended up not close to cinema but with a prime position on the map of contemporary auteurdom. “It felt like it would be a real job, instead of being in marketing or something. “Starting in Greece,” he says, “you couldn’t really say, ‘I’m going to become a film-maker.’ A 15-year-old boy in Greece in the 80s and 90s? There was nothing like that happening.” The idea was so unthinkable, he says, that he never even considered it when signing up for film school he just hoped to make commercials. And least likely to find himself seated in a vast, stately reception room – green, gold and imposingly Georgian – in Dublin’s Merrion hotel to discuss the film in question, The Favourite. Least likely to make a sumptuous period piece that’s a scabrous, subversive addition to the prestigious costume lineage of Tom Jones, The Draughtsman’s Contract and Barry Lyndon. Least likely to be one of the names that first arise when film people talk about the exciting new developments in Europe. Least likely to be a magnet for actors of the starry calibre of Nicole Kidman, Colin Farrell, Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz. Even for those of us who like our art films bleakly inscrutable, Kinetta was a tall order.īack then, you might have concluded that Lanthimos was the director Least Likely To. Oh, and there was the occasional go-karting sequence. There was barely any dialogue, except when one character barked detailed directions at the others. Filmed in the shakiest hand-held style, it featured three actors mooching around hotels and hospitals in a rundown Greek coastal town, sometimes enacting fight scenes that resembled avant-garde choreography rehearsals. T hirteen years ago, Yorgos Lanthimos made a micro-budget film called Kinetta.
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