THE LOBSTER: Love in the Time of Anomie

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Writers: Yorgos Lanthimos, Efthymis Filippou
Cast: Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Lea Seydoux, John C. Reilly, Ben Whishaw, Jessica Barden, Ariane Labed, Angeliki Papoulia
Runtime: 119 mins.
2016

The Lobster follows protagonist David (Colin Farrell) through his stay at The Hotel, a resort with one central purpose: to help its tenants find love and stable relationships with each other. Those who fail to find a partner by the end of their stay will be turned into an animal of their choosing. Life at the resort is rigorously structured, from the No Masturbation rule, to the strict meal and dance times, to the staged presentations about the superiority of couplehood, to the daily morning routine that involves a maid grinding on the male tenants' laps until they become hard--but not a moment longer. Everything about the place is meant to maximize the romantic desire and viability of its occupants; everything except the hunting of the Loners, that is.

Every day the tenants get on a bus with tranquilizer rifles in hand and head into the woods to hunt radicals who have defected from The Hotel and chosen an aggressively single lifestyle together. If you capture a Loner, one day is added to the duration of your stay. At first David participates clumsily in the hunt, but as his time runs out his relationship with the Loners becomes more complex.

If you were to go into The Lobster expecting some sort of sci-fi thriller, you would be mistaken. If you were to go in expecting a romantic comedy of sorts, you would also be mistaken. In fact, if you were to go into this movie expecting anything in particular, there's a significant chance of you walking away feeling frustrated or unsatisfied. The Lobster is so singular in its presentation that it doesn't fit into any boxes we typically stuff movies into. The closest comparison I can draw is that it is something like an extremely perverse version of a Wes Anderson movie, but even that fails at capturing what The Lobster is up to.


Foremost to note is that The Lobster is a naked allegory for love and relationships in our commodified, anomic modern world. The fact of its being an allegory is evident, though the layers of complexity heaped atop the narrative prevent it from being narrowly interpreted. In other words, this is the best kind of allegory: intuitive but not obvious, easily mappable but resistant to pigeonholing. In fact, the closest thing I have to a complaint about this film is the rare moment when the method of commentary is crystal clear, and thus verging towards on-the-nose. This takes the form of occasional throwaway quips, and they do little to sully the rich tapestry of this film.

Let's talk about that rich tapestry. The aesthetic Lanthimos uses to create The Lobster can best be described as washed out. I don't mean the visuals: Lanthimos creates three distinct visual landscapes--Hotel, Forest, and City--that may strike one as a bit drab on the surface, but are nonetheless incredibly lush. By washed out, I mean the tone and emotion of any given moment. Each scene is composed with a mixed sense of melancholy, resignation, and ritual. The characters are propelled through absurd bureaucratic systems that they fully accept even as they don't fully understand, an attitude that only heightens the absurdity. Despite the ridiculousness with which the characters are confronted, nothing ever surprises anybody. It's like Kafka without the straight man who bemoans his incomprehensible situation.

The Lobster wrings buckets of humor out of the dissonance between the characters' attitude towards the situation and the situation itself, all stemming from its commentary on enculturation and what we learn to be normal. It's a bit harder to find pathos in the narrative, due to the alienating behavior of the characters, but by the end of the film I was fully invested in the protagonist's arc regardless. The characters have a monotonous simplicity about their speech patterns that could easily have become rote, but that I found to be utterly earnest, sometimes to devastating effect. I am again reminded of the speech patterns of a Wes Anderson character.

Beyond that surface level comparison, I've never seen a performance style quite like The Lobster features. The most incredible accomplishment of the film is the way Lanthimos has assembled a knock-out cast of unique and distinctive performers, but has also managed to refine their disparate styles into remarkable uniformity. In what world could you ever call the work of Colin Farrell at all similar to that of John C. Reilly, or Lea Seydoux, or Rachel Weisz? The Lobster is, in fact, that world. Everybody is working magic within the minute range they are afforded, and it is beautiful to behold.

The net result of all these tonal gymnastics is an aesthetic precision that simultaneously invites you into an intimate space and pushes you away. Lanthimos is clearly interested in taking an observational stance towards modern romance, but refuses to let his narrative off the emotional hook. This effect on the viewer partly comes about because it is duplicated on the audience surrogate, David. David is the only named character in the story. Every other character is identified by their relationship with him, a symptom of the sad myopia also showcased by last year's Anomalisa. David is made impotent by his position at the center of interpersonal and cultural forces that he feels no ownership over, and even in the moments when he is pushed to take decisive action, he scrambles to discover the mystical rubikon of what action he specifically ought to take. This is all part and parcel of the pristine absurdism, so much that by the end of the film we don't know whether to laugh, cry, or simply sit in dull acceptance.

4.5 / 5  BLOBS