Sound and Vision: Yorgos Lanthimos
In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week we look at Leon of Athens' Baby Asteroid directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.
Sometimes the raison d'etre of Sound and Vision is that I find a music video that is counter to what we know the director for, like when we saw Lars von Trier directing a droll skydive music video for a dance group. Other times the music video is used to bring an aspect to their work in focus, like with Bernard Rose, for instance. But sometimes a music video is so much in the voice of its director that it feels cut from very much the same cloth as their films. This is the case for Baby Asteroid by Leon of Athens, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. It's not the first music video he has made, but it is the one that showcases his style best.
Yorgos Lanthimos is the master of cringe and humiliation. His wry and sardonic sense of humor can be offputting to some. His worldview is bleak. Films like The Killing of A Sacred Deer and Dogtooth border on the nihilistic, showing humanity as perverse, lost and broken, and humans as inherently evil at heart, between a thin veneer of socially acceptable behavior.
Baby Asteroid shows three vignettes in which bad people behave according to their nature. A severely bandaged man is used as a servant by a family member; a man is stabbed in plain sight and nobody bats an eye; and a horny babysitter tries to seduce the young teen in her care. All of the segments show a worldview that is filled with disdain for its subjects.
But Lanthimos is also known for his absurdist streak, coloring his pitchblack world with weird colors. Here some of the outcomes of the segments are exagarreted to such an extent, it is hard not to laugh. Be it the bandaged man going out of his way to serve a slice of lemon with the tea, or the young kid's reaction to a knife, the devil is in the details here. The specificity makes the situations that much worse, but also harder to not laugh at. It's bleak humor at its finest.
