While the acclaimed director has been having a stellar year, the sexual nature of his work is under scrutiny.
This year and the last have been monumental for acclaimed director Yorgos Lanthimos.
With the Oscar sweep earned by his eminent film Poor Things, the general public have been made privy to the wonderfully weird world of his films.
However, one glaring characteristic that most people cannot seem to ignore is the sexual nature of all his work. And it’s not just as simple as being overtly sexual in nature.
No, it is the way in which he chooses to portray such intimacy that leaves such room for debate.
]I was first introduced to Lanthimos’ work in 2019 when I stumbled across his film, The Lobster. It was ranked high on my favourite film reviewer’s Best Movies of the Year list, and I went into watching it with an open mind and zero pretence.
While the movie has several elements that awarded it such an impressive rank, the question that first came to mind and continued to stick with me was, ‘Why on earth are they having sex like that?’
The Greek director refuses to shy away from the perverse. In his films following and his films prior, sex in the ‘Lanthimos way’ remains a focal point. It is not glitzy or glamorous. At times the sex scenes are barely flattering to the actors.
With the widespread popularity of Poor Things many people have had that same line of questioning I did when I first entered the Lanthimos universe. He chooses to portray sex as mechanical, cold, sterile and in most cases painfully uncomfortable, to the point where one forgets that sex is being had and not some sort of awkward dance between two (or more) characters.
In an interview at the Venice Film Festival in 2023, Lanthimos states that he takes sex “from people”. He goes on to explain “I just observe and read and imagine, there’s absurdity in every kind of human behaviour.”
To him, sex is a source of comedy and is a commentary on human interaction. While this answer is simple enough, it does not fully satisfy the thoughts such scenes evoke.
Isabella Greenwood, a writer and arts/cultural critic, wrote her own article in Dazed about Lanthimos’ unwonted approach to sex.
When I asked her why she feels Lanthimos even decides to utilise sex in his way in his films, she said she agrees with the nature of absurdity he is aiming to traverse but also asserts that he is conveying ‘the disconnect between desire and emotion, and the mechanisms of control embedded within societal structures.’
She goes on to further detail that ‘By presenting sex as mechanical, alienating, or grotesquely humorous, Lanthimos defamiliarises one of the most intimate and primal human experiences. This defamiliarisation allows him to critique not just individual sexuality, but how society polices bodies, desires, and pleasures.’
Greenwood believes that Lanthimos aims to ‘use sex to explore power dynamics, the transactional nature of intimacy, and our collective alienation under capitalist systems.’
‘I just observe and read and imagine, there’s absurdity in every kind of human behaviour.’
Yorgos Lanthimos
This is shown quite explicitly in Poor Things as the main character Bella uses her sexuality as a means to traverse the world and learn more about it, but without the common motif of shame or eroticism that is traditionally used in cinema.
To further grasp the general public’s perspective on this topic, I asked someone who is more casually interested in films to analyse Lanthimos’ work and give me their initial thoughts on the sex scenes in them.
Doreen, like many people, left each movie with more questions than she started with. She said it seemed as if “he himself hasn’t properly understood the depths of sex”. To her, he appears to be a made plagued with “porn brain” and is attempting to use his films to “experiment with some sort of wokeness surrounding the topic of sex”.
She went on to say “usually a man who views sex more as an action and less as a connection have some sort of sexual or religious trauma and or do not value the people they have sex with. His movies and their sex scenes are hollow. The male characters in his films no longer view women as sensual and complex beings, just sex dolls with moans.”
Greenwood made a comment that explained why Doreen and many other viewers may have such a visceral reaction to Lanthimos’ sex scenes: “The effect on the audience is one of profound discomfort, but also an intellectual provocation. Lanthimos disrupts our expectations of sex on screen—eschewing eroticism in favour of alienation—and in doing so, forces us to question how our own experiences and perceptions of intimacy have been shaped by cultural narratives.”
Even if he does not explicitly claim that this is his intention, the riling and controversial undertones of his work are what engages the audience.
“His sex scenes are unsettling because they strip away sentimentality and present the act as a kind of grotesque ritual, or worse, as another manifestation of social control. For the audience, this creates a friction between what is depicted and what we are conditioned to desire, inviting a reevaluation of the intersection between personal agency, desire, and societal impositions,” Greenwood continues.
Film and screen studies graduate Dami Ojobaro shared a lot of the same sentiments as Greenwood, so I asked him why he believes there are such polarising opinions regarding Lanthimos’ presentation of sex: “As society has progressed sexuality particularly is a consensus that varies regarding individuals. I think some people are more traditional in their opinions of sex whereas people are more progressive. I think the way in which sex is portrayed might have people who are more traditional unable to fathom that times have changed,” he told me.
Ojobaro continues by saying that: “Depicting sex on screen in the way in which Lanthimos does is boundary-breaking/progressive but also simultaneously uncomfortable – the beauty of cinema.”
He also commented on the way that intimacy is explored through film traditionally versus how Lanthimos chooses to navigate it: “Desensitisation can change how we perceive relationships and intimacy, making it harder to see sex as something deeply personal. This sentiment is reflected within Poor Things rather than sex being an intimate moment. For me the repeated use of it replaced actual lines in the movie, becoming a verbal motif Lanthimos used to show progression within Bella and her sexuality.”
Whether Lanthimos’ work fosters intrigue or discomfort, his sex scenes have become his unique selling point which directly plays into the niche he has created.
No matter the opinion, the reaction is overt and contributes heavily to the success of his films.
Featured image courtesy of Searchlight Pictures