Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
I was prepared to dislike The Lobster, if only because of the last Yorgos Lanthimos movie I had seen. That would be Dogtooth (2009), in which a couple kept their children from the outside world, taught them the wrong names for things, and encouraged incest. While The Lobster is not as preposterous — and I must concede that’s not saying much — it is more intriguing, even funny, in ways just as dysfunctional.
The movie opens with a woman in a car. She stops at a field, and through the rain-streaked windshield we see her shoot a donkey dead. Flash title card, then a shot of David sitting on a couch, a dog at his feet. His wife has left him for another man, so now he is being sent off to a hotel/resort for single people. As it turns out, anyone uncommitted is frowned upon by this society. A resident has 45 days to find a partner, or be transformed into an animal. David wants to be a lobster — an unusual choice, notes the hotel manager. Except, one wonders, what about his brother? In case you missed it, that would be the dog.
The residents go on a hunting trip. Not for deer or other wild game, but for “loners” hiding in the nearby woods. It begs to be asked why these “rebels” could not set up camp further away in the interest of survival, but in a case such as this where a filmmaker has thrown out the rulebook, irrelevant. For every loner a guest kills, an extra day from animal-ship. The characters do not evince much self-awareness beyond the drive to escape that fate. Even then, the accepted norm is that like forces attract, so one with a limp or lisp, for example, can only pair with the same. Sans physical impediment, David goes for heartless. See how far he pushes that envelope. Indeed, by the end you will have wondered if David has quite grasped what it means to have contravened all the rules.
This is obviously not the kind of movie to make a noise at the box office, but here they are, anyway: Collin Farrell, John C. Reilly, Rachel Weisz, Ben Whishaw — deadpanning all the way. Their presence gives this film a shot at gaining a wider audience, while somehow emphasizing the weirdness of it all. When you say that a filmmaker is someone “with a vision,” I bet you’re not thinking of Yorgos Lanthimos.
It hardly spoils the movie to tell you that David ends up in the loner camp. Or falls in what can only be, by his standards, called love. By such time you will either have fallen for this movie’s insidious charm or walked out of the theater wanting your money back. I am tempted to compare Lanthimos to Aki Kaurismäki, that Finnish chronicler of sad sacks and losers, except that Kaurismäki’s films are premised on familiar situations, whereas Lanthimos’ milieux are simply veneered with familiarity. Not once does he let slip that the narratives he tells are any more than what is presented. If you find this movie funny and disturbing, you will have found the right note to approach his outré oeuvre. But don’t be smug. You have only just opened yourself up to more uncomfortable possibilities.
This post has no comments.
Post a Comment