The Onion recently ran a headline stating: “Yorgos Lanthimos Figures He’s Three Films Away from Hanging with Emma Stone Outside Work.” It’s funny because it’s true, as the saying goes. Or at least it feels true.
It speaks to a pervading sense of mismatch, an incongruity between the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, responsible for weirdo classics such as Dogtooth and Alps and the Hollywood star of Easy A and La La Land. The brainiac bearded director must be enamoured of the fawn-like star, we mutter, collectively.
But let’s face it, collective muttering is the worst kind of muttering. It has a sexist undertone. Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese, David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen, Ryan Coogler and Michael B Jordan are all seen as co-equal partners in their films: collaborators who spark off each other.
And Stone and Lanthimos both have long-term partners – Lanthimos is married to Greek actress and director Ariane Labed, while Stone has a daughter and production company with her husband Dave McCary. But still there is what Don Logan would call the “sinnuendo.”
Emma Stone has collaborated with Lanthimos on five pictures: one short – Bleat – and four features, with their most recent – Bugonia – in cinemas now. Each of the films has brought a fascinating, off-beat European sensibility to relatively large-scale productions with his latest the biggest budget yet.
Lanthimos is a dark absurdist, a sort of transcendental nihilist, who believes not only that there is no meaning to the universe but looking for one can only lead to misery. Stone with her wit and likability, lovability even, brings an essential ingredient to the films: a soulfulness. Even as her characters might be odd, conniving, duplicitous or cruel, you can’t help but wish them well and pity their shortfalls and downfalls. She’s the meaning which Lanthimos doesn’t think exists. That’s the tension.
In their first film together, The Favourite, Stone was one of a trio of female leads starring as a poor cousin who competes with Rachel Weisz’s court schemer to become the confidant of Olivia Colman’s Queen Anne. As the only American in the cast and playing a period film for the first time, Stone struggled with corsets, the rigours of a shoot which was using only natural light or candlelight, and an English accent. Yet though Colman was the only one of the three nominated actors to take home an Oscar, it was a performance which extended perceptions of Stone beyond the romcom range.
The film was a breakthrough also for Lanthimos, who had already had two bites of the Hollywood apple: The Lobster with Rachel Weisz and Colin Farrell, and The Killing of the Sacred Deer, with Farrell again and Nicole Kidman. But both films – though excellent – hardly dented the box office. They were hammer blows to the skull, but they lacked the velvet that Stone would provide.
With the accolades pouring in following The Favourite, Lanthimos resuscitated a long-term project: an adaptation of Alasdair Grey’s novel Poor Things, and he had already been talking to Stone as the lead. She didn’t only provide star power, she was also a producer on the film and had a say in casting, heads of departments and the development of the script.
In the film, Stone plays Bella Baxter, a woman who has been resurrected from the dead after a brain transplant with… well, that’s a spoiler. As an ingénue, Baxter moves through the world discovering the joys of sex, power and experience while also having to deal with the horrors of patriarchy, social injustice and exploitation.
Some criticised the film and the male director and screenwriter for presenting Poor Things as a feminist treatise on empowerment when it was actually a retread of the “born sexy yesterday” trope (do something twice and it’s a trope). Personally – cis-white-male klaxon sounds – I find the film exhilarating in the way Bella refused simple categorisation, and Stone’s performance, violent, physical, witty and grounded despite the oddness of the situation, was a fundamental part of that.
I’m not sure she’s a feminist heroine, despite Stone’s remarks about how liberating it was to play her. Bella’s resistance to conformity can’t be squeezed into a neat ideological box, even one which might feel more agreeable. Whatever, it won Stone a second Academy Award as best actress (she also won in 2017, for La La Land).
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As the film was in post-production, Lanthimos and Stone shot their third feature together, Kinds of Kindness, a triptych of interrelated shorts also starring Jesse Plemons, Margaret Qualley and Willem Dafoe. Like all anthology films, there’s an imbalance written into the film – some episodes work better than others – but the cast were exceptional, and again with Lanthimos, we were seeing something that no one else in Hollywood was providing.
Their latest work Bugonia might well be their masterpiece. Stone plays a corporate executive who is kidnapped by a conspiracy theorist (Jesse Plemons) and his cousin (Aiden Delbis) and interrogated and tortured in an attempt to get her to confess to her true identity: an alien, leading part of an outer space conspiracy intent on taking over the world. The satirical thrust is brilliantly simple: late-stage capitalism is indistinguishable from an alien force preying on humanity.
Once more, Stone plays a character who goes through physically gruelling procedures which ultimately the actress herself also has to submit to (and thereby lending credence that Lanthimos is perhaps working through something). Most strikingly, she has her head shaved – no baldcap here.
This is one reason people get queasy about Stone and Lanthimos. It feels like her characters must always suffer indignities at his hands. In The Favourite, she gets buckets of freezing water thrown on her. In Poor Things, there’s an extended brothel scene in which Bella services a series of less-than-attractive men. In Kinds of Kindness, one of her characters is drugged and raped while she’s unconscious.
But this rather ignores two things: everyone gets horribly treated in Lanthimos’s films, and if anything, the power dynamic is more in Stone’s favour than his. There’s nothing that she is doing in these films which she won’t have a full say in.
But here is the reason she wants to work with Lanthimos as well. She wants to do powerful, fascinating work, which doesn’t conform and stands out on its own terms: like Bella Baxter.
She could be doing Crazy Stupid Love 2 (I’d be so down for that, now I think about it), but she’s stretching herself and her craft and giving some of the strangest and most interesting work currently leaking like an alien fluid into the mainstream. So to answer the obvious clickbait of my own headline: No.
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