Cannes at Home: Day 4 – Guilt Trips

by Cláudio Alves

KINDS OF KINDNESS (2024) Yorgos Lanthimos

After the uproar Megalopolis caused, day four at the Cannes Film Festival was bound to pale in comparison. Nevertheless, it was a busy time at the Croisette, with three Main Competition films making their bows. First was Emanuel Pârvu's Three Miles to the End of the World, which was thought to be a strong contender for the Queer Palm before being met with tepid reviews. Next was Yorgos Lanthimos' Kinds of Kindness, an anthological reunion between the director and his erstwhile writing partner, Efthymis Filippou. The well-reviewed picture marks their first collaboration since 2017. Finally, beloved auteur and Facebook nuisance Paul Schrader presented Oh, Canada, ruminating on mortality and regret. 

Walking down memory lane into these directors' past work, let's consider a tryptic bound by themes of guilt. They're Pârvu's Mikado, Lanthimos' The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and Schrader's Light Sleeper…

MIKADO (2021) Emanuel Pârvu

In a Romania where the threat of COVID is still strong enough that people wear masks wherever they go, a father presents his teen daughter with a gift. It's a necklace in white gold, a trinket he'd seen her covet before. Not long after this offer, the jewelry is nowhere to be seen. Magda says she's given it to a sick child in the hospital where she volunteers, but the patriarch doesn't believe her. After much trouble, the girl proves her innocence, though that doesn't relent the furious man. Riddled with shame, drowning in guilt, he lashes out again and the consequences are deadly. Still, no matter what, he won't accept blame or admit he did anything wrong.

Mikado, also known as Marocco, keeps expanding, from the father to his daughter, to the hospital staff, and their families. A gesture of male rage is a punch in a pane of glass, cracks spreading from the center. Trying to put it back together is useless. You just end up with shards everywhere and your hands full of cuts, bleeding, ruined. But it's not all consequence of the inciting incident. A troubled past involving a dying mother rears its ugly head, informing present resentments from a daughter who thought her father should have done more. A history of heart disease sheds doubts on the correlation between events, cause and effect dubiously defined. Only the sense that something wrong happened persists unquestioned.

Truth be told, the story Pârvu conceived with Alexandru Popa isn't the most engaging or unique. However, smart formal choices abound, elevating the project above other minor works in the Romanian New Wave. Even when filming other people – like doctors and nurses at the accursed hospital – the camera stays at the father's eye level. It's constantly looking down, literally. You can practically feel the paternalism vibrating off of the screen. In some ways, it's as if the film gives form to his gaze, forcing him to acknowledge all the pain and sorrow his stubbornness wrought. But is it implying the protagonist's awareness of everything he set in motion or pleading for sympathy on his behalf. 

Furthermore, Mikado presents itself as a fantastic piece of economic storytelling through cutting. We don't see the discovery of the truth, only the beginning of a snitch and the ensuing argument. We don't see a death, only the woman returning home, followed by her son struggling to claim her body at the morgue. Events that would consume other films happen between cuts, leaving us in the aftermath, stewing in what comes next. And so, guilt becomes stomach-like, enveloping protagonist and viewer, an acidic chamber slowly digesting one's soul. That said, it feels like the film runs out of steam near the end, or maybe stomach acid or bile. Whatever the case, when there are no more escalations to come, life goes on. Until it doesn't.

Mikado is currently streaming on Klassiki.

THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER (2017) Yorgos Lanthimos 

In 2017, while attending the Ghent Film Festival, I watched The Killing of a Sacred Deer for the first time. It was the first Lanthimos film with which I struggled, having previously been enchanted by the likes of Dogtooth and The Lobster. In revisiting it, I hoped new qualities would reveal themselves to me so that I could share the love so many others feel for this Cincinnati-set story of a son's revenge and a family's dereliction. The experiment had mixed results since, while the struggle remained, many of the picture's strong suits shined brighter than before. Perhaps it stems from knowing where Lanthimos' filmography was headed post-Killing.

In hindsight, more than a last link to his origins in the Greek Weird Wave, this Filippou-scripted film reads like the culmination of Lanthimos' formal strategies from the first half of his career. There's no frantic editing here, nor the frenzy of shifting registers. The fisheye lenses Robbie Ryan fell in love with on The Favourite set are also absent. Indeed, Thimios Bakatakis shot The Killing of a Sacred Deer, finding a thousand strategies to render the mundane terrifying. It's in the textures of a too-polished suburbia, the sterility of glass-walled hospitals, a sickening sunshine that should be warm but feels frigid on fever-hot skin.   

Most amazingly, it's in the compositions devised with Lanthimos, great imbalances of architecture and the vast blue sky, puny people and the emptiness around them. Tweaking proportions – showing too much ceiling is a recurring strategy – the filmmakers unsettle the viewer in ways that are hard to articulate. While watching, it feels primordial, as if some part of our lizard brain was reacting against what it perceives as corrupt. Like the family at its center, the screen is infirm. And just like those not-so-innocent souls, it's not a mere matter of toxic substances running through the organism. Instead, a preternatural curse seems set on them all.

Beyond form, The Killing of a Sacred Deer is also a farewell from Lanthimos to the alienating performance style he developed with his early films. Non-demonstrative, stilted, the cast doesn't act human or according to most conventions on what constituted "good" acting. It may have made sense if they were caught in a somnambulistic trance. But even then, some more expressivity should shine through. Some will see that as a terrible defect in the machine, though I love what it brings out of people like Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman, whose portrait of matrimony is sensationally selfish. Not to mention that when guilt comes into play, it becomes unnerving how much the actors refuse to express it in familiar terms. 

In the middle of all this, the writing is the great Achilles Heel and the element that still leads me to claim The Killing of a Sacred Deer as Lanthimos' least successful feature. Though it might sound odd, I wonder if a dedramatized text would improve the picture. Forego Barry Keoghan's mastermind monster and the revenge plot altogether. Instead, let us anguish in the nightmare domesticity evoked by the formal discipline. Explore how far the cast can take their game, how much the audience could tolerate the wrongness before they snapped. As it stands, the pictures' stabs at narrative perversity dull the edge of Lanthimos' scalpel. 

The Killing of a Sacred Deer is streaming on Max, Kanopy, Plex, and Showtime. You can also rent or purchase it on most major platforms.

LIGHT SLEEPER (1992) Paul Schrader

It's always sweet when a film wins your heart in its opening salvo. Instant infatuation can sometimes crumble before the end credits roll, but you can't deny the electricity of that first impression. Paul Schrader's Light Sleeper doesn't fall apart, though it falls on some of its auteur's favorite tropes, fulfilling the promise of a sterling start that got me from minute one. In a New York lensed with neo-noir melancholy by Ed Lachman, Willem Dafoe drifts, shadow-like yet seductive in his somber state. Through streets full of trash and wet pavement, seedy little joints and high-class establishments, he's a specter whose interiority wails in the soundtrack's sad song.

He's John LeTour, living day to day with no direction beyond his job as a drug delivery man. Yearning for something different, mayhap a chance to change, he wants to be good person. But can we ever change who we fundamentally are? For a brief moment, when the ex-wife crosses his path, our lonely hero seems to believe so. It's a prickle of hope, a faint twinkle in the starless sky of his existence, so tempting there's no way to resist. And so, he pounces on the opportunity, forgetting that the sins in one's past have a way to catch up with them. When they do, cosmic punishment shall fall from the skies, and what was thought forgotten will re-emerge with a vengeance. 

Like Schrader's Taxi Driver and American Gigolo, his Light Sleeper is a man in his room, trapped in a vice of self-reflection that sometimes seems capable of eating him from the inside out. Like the future tryptic of "God's Lonely Men," he also pours himself into a journal to which Dafoe gives voice. The narration is a veil over the action, morose and evocative, translucid yet transformative. Through it, a cascade of sex and bad decisions becomes an experience closer to lucid dreaming without the surreal flourishes other filmmakers would foist upon it. And along with the oneiric comes the guilt, so strong it would read Catholic if not for Schrader's Protestant faith. 

Even so, at times, Dafoe's drug dealer does double duty as priest for his clientele. They confide and confess, as if part of a new branch of the Catholic Church where, instead of wafers and wine, coke takes center stage in the communion ritual. Then again, Dafoe isn't necessarily shot like a man of the cloth. Instead, the camera depicts him as martyrized saint, a criminal with a code whose languorous sorrow results in naked tableaux of unfathomable beauty. Dafoe and a besotting Susan Sarandon have rarely looked this good. In fact, everyone is beautiful, even the peripheral goons who the camera licks up like a tasty treat with high cheekbones and jaws for days. 

Gorgeous and pensive, a shot of despondency laced with the faintest optimism, Light Sleeper feels tender above it all. While Schrader may not be often associated with such notions, I've come to appreciate the delicacy with which so many of his works consider the characters on screen. It's a generous cinema, whose surface cruelty is thin compared to the depth of gentle feeling hiding below. And yes, it's got the Pickpocket ending, but there's a charge of character specificity that makes it more than just another Bresson homage. Credit the actors, if not Schrader, because their performances are movie magic depurated, crystalized, and immensely moving.

Light Sleeper is streaming on Amazon Prime Video and Tubi. You can also rent or buy it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, and YouTube.

You can expect more insights into The Killing of a Sacred Deer in the near future, with a special focus on one of its cast members. More on that later.