Stilted Humanity: Acting Lanthimos
Sunday, April 5, 2020 at 2:30PM 
Since his third feature opened at the 2009 Cannes Film festival, Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos has been something of an international sensation. Dogtooth, that masterpiece of perverted domesticity, even conquered a surprising Academy-Award nomination along with its sterling reviews. From relative obscurity, Lanthimos thus became a household name for cinephiles all over the world and his next projects were followed with breathless anticipation. The formalistic precision, violent nature of his scenarios and the unsettling horror of the stories enchanted many and disgusted even more.
All of these choices are transgressive as it's fitting of the cinema of the Greek Weird Wave. However, such elements aren't as uncommon as many suppose. If you look hard enough through the wilderness of festival offerings, it's easy to find many similar aesthetic and narrative propositions. Yorgos Lanthimos does them with rare perfection, but that doesn't mean they are radically rare. Much more off-beat and idiosyncratic is the way this provocative filmmaker works with actors…
;)
The standard performance styles of the big screen have changed throughout film history and heavily depend on the cultural context from which any given production is originated. After years of talkies where stylized acting was dominant, post-war American theatre started to affect the paradigms of performance onscreen. By the late 60s and early 70s, realism stopped being news, asserting itself as a wide-ranging norm. The way audiences appreciate acting was also altered and, to this day, we can see people judging a performance's merit by how credible it is.
If it's understood as close to reality, a certain piece of acting is considered good. If it comes off as unreal, it's deemed bad. There are variations, for sure, but the standard is there, molding the way spectators watch cinema and how filmmakers create. That taste for credibility in Art, for authenticity and perfect mimesis, affected many parts of moviemaking. Whatever artists or national cinemas insist on deviating from the model are classified as outliers. Usually, their works are also perceived as weird, difficult, inscrutable or plain bad.
For instance, I've read many pieces by "western" critics where the acting in some genres of South Korean cinema is deemed as too broad, even cartoony. Not all of those texts reached negative conclusions, but the need to point out this rule-breaking proves the existence of the rule. Film acting should reproduce reality, it seems. I, for one, disagree with this presumed need for mimetic exactitude and love to celebrate those who chose to go against the dominant standards. Hegemonies should be questioned and their dismantlement applauded.
Within such an environment of cinematic production and appreciation, the cinema of Yorgos Lanthimos shines as a beacon of weirdness that's gaining unexpected popularity. More than his sadistic plots and clinical mise-en-scène, how Lanthimos directs actors is a marvelous bit of transgression. More specifically, how divorced from human behavior his actors are when in front of the camera, almost like aliens trying to evoke our way of being.
Line readings are broken into strange rhythms, their intonation jagged and abrasive. A bit of formal dinner conversation in The Killing of a Sacred Deer is mutated into a festival of vomited inanities. In The Lobster, a society obsessed with romantic engagement is acted as emotionless robots, their spoken expression as erratic as their abrupt movement. Olivia Colman smiles feel unprompted and wrong just as Ben Whishaw's posture is always rigid, unnatural in a purposeful manner.
;)
It's wild to consider such a thing, but The Favourite is, by far, the most conventional of the director's efforts. In many other filmographies, that portrait of demented power dynamics would be a spiky bit of provocation, but, in the context of Lanthimos, it's almost banal. Well, it's relatively banal though still alienating in many ways, full of outlandish bits of violent abrasion. Take the mannered use of gesture throughout, how performers underline the calculated nature of their seduction games with the stiltedness of pose. As the patina of realism is scratched off, every character choice gains an augmented sense of deliberateness.
A raised hand or hunched back is a point of focus for the spectator instead of another negligible tidbit of busywork building an illusion of reality. The characters can't hide what goes on in their heads because their actors can't hide behind behavioral verisimilitude. When the rules are broken, every choice becomes noticeable and it's a spectacle worth watching, both because of its ignoble ugliness and transcendent beauty. In monochord speech and grotesque physicality, Lanthimos' actors are always ready to surprise us.
Three of Lanthimos' Greek films are available on The Criterion Channel. As for his Anglophonic projects, you can stream The Lobster on Netflix, The Killing of a Sacred Deer on Amazon Prime and The Favourite on HBO NOW.
Reader Comments (6)
Claudio your pieces are the equivalent of the best sex a person will ever have in their life! It seems only when you publish a new piece one can feel that sensation again, so bravo good sir!
I'm hardly the only one to point it out, but the stilted dialogue in "The Lobster" particularly seems like a canny (uncanny?) way of translating the inflection-free, semantically fuzzy nature of texting to human speech. Which is apropos considering the world of the film, which is structured by the logics of dating app-like matching.
It's probably also worth mentioning the history of this kind of Brechtian acting in cinema, for context.
Jonathan -- That's a good point about the inflectionless expression of texting.
Maybe someday I'll write about this sort of acting in a more historical context. In this piece, I tried to just talk about Lanthimos. Thank you for the suggestion, nonetheless.
I have to say, however, that I don't know if I'd characterize acting in Lanthimos films as necessarily Brechtian. If we're comparing it to Theatre vanguard, I think Meyerhold may be a better example. I remember thinking of his mechanical theories of actors' movement when seeing Whishaw in The Lobster.
Thanks for the feedback.
I think his style works well in The Killing of a Sacred Deer,I have seen it 3 times and laugh in different places each time even though the dialogue tells me I shouldn't be the delivery is so dead pan.
Cláudio
The physical acting in Lanthimos' films is too realistic to be compared to Meyerhold. The Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt seems to be far more prominent.
DI -- In The Favourite and Killing of a Sacred Deer it's certainly too close to natural movement, but I don't know if I'd say the same about The Lobster and Alps. The way we see mechanical, repeated motions in The Lobster is particularly interesting to me and did remind me of some of Meyerhold's texts. Still, that's a matter for another piece, one that would require quite a lot of detailed research. Maybe I'll write about it someday.
I appreciate the intelligent input and discussion, by the way. Thank you.