Kinetta

Yorgos Lanthimos' solo directorial debut is a 95 mins long exercise in boredom & nonsense that at first piques the curiosity with its perplexing premise but it doesn't take long for the interest to fizzle out. An experimental drama that deals with psychology & behaviour studies through three strangers who team up to recreate badly reenacted scenes of homicides, Kinetta is one hell of a slog.

Also co-written by Lanthimos (Dogtooth & Alps), the story should've sufficed as a short film, for it doesn't have enough material to deliver as a feature-length narrative. Lanthimos' lets the plot to drift & wander with no sense of direction and the dreary ambience & awful camerawork don't help the cause either. There are however signs of quirkiness that the director is today known for but it's not refined.

The dizzy handheld camerawork becomes a bother after a while and the characters being cold & distant don't offer any inlet into the story as well. Performances are barely serviceable, its 95 mins narrative is tediously paced and bland editing makes the whole thing a frustrating sit. The idiosyncrasy on display doesn't have much to hold on to, and just being able to sit through it all feels like an achievement.

Overall, Kinetta is a dull, lifeless & excruciatingly slow offering that unfolds like a story on stasis and suffers from poor direction, lazy writing & no idea about what it wants to be. An experiment by the filmmaker to carve out his own unique style by throwing around a few ideas & checking if any of it sticks, this Greek picture is neither properly executed nor thought through and is solely reserved for Lanthimos completists.

Well. I'm not sure why, but I love movies like these.

Not a plot going on, not a very known backstory, lots of experiments... Great.

I do love this director, but never heard about this one.

Decided to take a look and... well. I truly enjoyed It.

I never went to Greece so... maybe there's a lot of things that make sense only for the locals but, still, I loved the ambience, the rythm, the silence.

It touched me in a strange way.

I'm not sure If this is a movie to recommend, but give It a chance.

Maybe, who known, it's your kind of movie too?

And, for sure, it's a great introduction to Yorgos cinema.

The main fascination of "Kinetta" is imagining you have a time machine and you go back to 2005 and you show this film to someone and you tell him that, beginning right from his next film, director Yorgos Lanthimos will win Oscars and nominations and Cannes awards and become the most internationally recognizable Greek director since Theo Angelopoulos; they'd never believe you. The one similar case of meteoric rise to fame may be James Cameron with "Terminator"right after...."Piranha II: The Spawning". "Kinetta" is an extraordinarily dreadful movie: there is literally not a single scene in it that a) makes sense, b) has a point, or c) leads somewhere. The most mundane shots are held for an eternity (and a day). The only saving grace is that the female lead, Evangelia Randou, has a beautiful face, and hair, and total package really. Most meaningful dialogue exchange: "Do you want mayonnaise in your sandwich?" - "Just a little". 0.5 out of 4.

One rarely gets a chance to see a Greek film in Greece, never mind the United States! So, when I found out that the Harvard Film Archive was showing "Kinetta" as part of a new European film series, I ran to see it. The fact that it was in the International Competition section of the 2005 Thessaloniki Film Festival gave me some assurance that it would it be a good film.

Was I wrong! The film opened with a silent montage of scenes that was bewildering. The few of us that were in the audience wondered whether there was a problem with the sound system. There was no problem with the sound system, but it was emblematic of what was wrong with the film. From the soundtrack to the jerky hand-held camera work, there seemed to be no justification for Giorgos Lanthimo's choices. It all seemed to be part of an intellectual exercise that repelled the viewer, rather than draw him in to the drama that was unfolding in front of him. Well, if repelling the viewer was Lanthimo's purpose, he was certainly successful! After 10 minutes, I wanted to walk out, but my masochism kept me in my seat for another 30 minutes. Finally, I gave up on the film and left. Another 50 minutes of watching it would have been unbearable. I was sorry not to have been the first to walk out; several others of the dozen or so in the audience preceded me.

While I was trying to give the film a chance to draw me in, I was thinking that in some way it was quite accurate in its depiction of how drab and meaningless life in Greece can be these days. But, it made that point within the first 20 minutes or so. The rest of the film lacked any artistic merit.

Michelangelo Antonioni said in an interview some years ago, that a filmmaker should not be concerned for the entertainment value of his films or be concerned of what the audience will think. I agree with Antonioni, but Lanthimos is definitely not an Antonioni!

99% percent of 21st century Greek filmmakers would not be able to direct a good film even if their life depended on it. It's no coincidence that the crowning achievement of modern Greek cinema-Dogtooth-borrows its plot and visual style from other films. Left alone to his own devices, the best someone like Lanthimos can come up with is rubbish like Kineta and Alps.

Despite an impressive visual style, Kineta is one of the worst films ever made. No story, awful acting, terrible pace. What's even worse is that every Greek filmmaker is trying to imitate the Lanthimos style, hoping to get some exposure at a European film festival.

It's been a long established fact that none of these films get their money back. The only reason they keep on getting made is because of state funding. This is one more of the failures of European socialism. Funneling taxpayers money to support art of dubious quality. It wouldn't surprise me if the directors made the film with a fraction of the allocated budget, pocketing the best. There was once a time when commercial films made in Greece were able to fill the cinemas. Quite naturally those films were considered low level because they were made strictly for entertainment purposes. Unfortunately this system has been destroyed and replaced by organizations with a political agenda. This is a general problem that occurs all over the European Union. Just take a look at the type of films that are promoted in European festivals. Filmmakers hoping to become the next Lanthimos don't dare to experiment. It would be equal to suicide.

Bear in mind that there is no such thing as an European art film. None of the films getting the main prizes in European festivals are "art". They are just a product created by people who follow established guidelines. It doesn't matter if nobody goes to the theater to see it as long as funding for the next project has been secured. This is how the system works.