Yorgos Lanthimos (2015)
As in Yorgos Lanthimos’s two previous films, Dogtooth (2009) and Alps (2011), the main characters in The Lobster are part of an aberrant way of life; the drama derives principally from attempts made to disrupt or escape the world of which they’re part. Lanthimos has progressively expanded the scope of his dystopic realms. In Dogtooth, the setting was a single family home. In Alps, the title characters offered their extraordinary services to whoever wanted to use them. The Lobster – with a screenplay by Lanthimos and his usual writing partner, Efthimis Filippou, that’s in every sense original – describes the operation of society at large. It’s a society, supposedly in the near future, in which living without a partner is legally forbidden. Singles – including those alone as a result of the death of, or separation from, a partner – must report to a hotel in the English countryside. They’re required to find there, within forty-five days, a matching mate. If they succeed, they return to society (‘The City’) with their new partner. If they fail, they are killed and reincarnated as a non-human animal of their choice. Each individual is registered with the authorities as having one defining characteristic, and the compatibility of partners is confirmed by their sharing this characteristic. In the film’s opening scene, bespectacled David (Colin Farrell) learns unhappily that his wife (Rosanna Hoult) is going to leave him for another: he asks if the new man wears glasses or contact lenses. David then turns for consolation to his dog, which, we soon learn, is the reincarnation of his singleton brother.
David, with dog, checks in at the hotel and completes its extraordinary registration process. He’s interviewed by the brisk, smilingly officious manager (Olivia Colman), who asks him to confirm his preferred zoological choice in the event that reincarnation is required. David chooses a lobster because lobsters live for a hundred years and remain fertile throughout their life; besides, David likes the sea. The hotel manager congratulates him on an ‘excellent’ choice. She adds contemptuously that most people choose to be a dog; their poverty of imagination explains, she says, why there are so many endangered species in the world. The first hour of The Lobster is among the best I’ve spent in the cinema this year. Yorgos Lanthimos’s introduction to the routines and regulations of the hotel, and some of its current guests, is sharp, startling and funny. One of the most purely enjoyable bits is a duet (‘Save Your Love’), performed by Olivia Colman’s character and her partner (Gary Mountaine) to the assembled guests in the restaurant-cum-ballroom. On a darker note, the guests, armed with tranquilliser guns, take part in nightly hunts for the single people – ‘loners’ – hiding out in the woods beyond the hotel grounds. For each loner felled by a tranquilliser dart and captured, the guest who fired the shot gains an extra day on their forty-five day allowance.
The other characters are mostly named for their distinguishing feature, although we know that Limping Man (Ben Whishaw) is called John. David socialises with him and Lisping Man (John C Reilly). Each of the male guests must be sexually stimulated each day by a hotel maid (Ariane Labed); the prohibition on going-it-alone extends to masturbation, as Lisping Man discovers when he’s caught in the act and punished for it. The recently widowed Limping Man decides, with no suitable new mate in sight, to feign a new primary trait: by hitting his nose hard enough to make it bleed, he secures a partnership with Nosebleed Woman (Jessica Barden). This encourages David to broaden his myopic horizon: he attempts a relationship with Heartless Woman (Angeliki Papoulia), the most accomplished hunter among the guests. David impresses her with his appearance of sang froid, while she looks to be choking to death on an olive, but their relationship founders when Heartless Woman brutally kills the dog-brother and David can’t disguise his distress. She intends to report him to the hotel authorities for faking heartlessness but, before she can, David, with the help of the stimulating maid, tranquillises Heartless Woman and manages to escape from the hotel.
Once David starts hiding out in the woods and gets to know the loners there, The Lobster becomes less satisfying. The guerrilla-singletons, opposed to flirtation and coupledom, supply a plot symmetry but their ideology, unlike the one that the hotel regime represents, doesn’t feel like a pathological exaggeration of tendencies perceptible in real life in the early twenty-first century. Although living alone doesn’t carry the same stigmas that it once did, cultural expectations – as reflected in advertising, dating agencies, and so on – are largely predicated on an assumption that no normal human being would rather be solitary. The compatibility element of Lanthimos’s dystopia is satirically acute (Guy Lodge, writing in Variety, describes it as skewering ‘the like-for-like algorithms of online dating sites and the hot-or-not snap judgments of Tinder’). So is the fact that – as that opening conversation between David and his wife suggested – fidelity within a relationship is relatively unimportant: getting rid of your old partner is fine, so long as you get yourself a new one. In contrast, the loners’ modus vivendi in The Lobster doesn’t take off from recognisable conventions and it’s relatively uninteresting for the audience to spend screen time in the company of these people. Compared with the hotel guests, the loners (headed by Léa Seydoux) are lacking in comic idiosyncrasy and Lanthimos doesn’t make their humourlessness humorous. The loners carry out a relationship-wrecking raid on the hotel but the story focuses increasingly on David, a beautiful short-sighted woman (Rachel Weisz), their mutual attraction and the complexities of that in the loner system. David and Short Sighted Woman are sent, as loner spies, on covert missions to the City, where twosomes are de rigueur and where they must therefore pretend to be a couple.
As the film becomes less engaging, you start to find the time to query some of the hotel-based part of The Lobster. The exchanges between David and the fraternal dog, named Bob, are amusing but why is Bob allowed to stay with David? (In spite of what the manager said about canine over-representation in the ranks of the reincarnated, there are no other man’s-best-friends in evidence at the hotel.) John/Limping Man’s change of distinguishing feature is surprisingly easily accepted by the powers-that-be; his dissimulation also raises the issue of competing characteristics in one individual, which Yorgos Lanthimos then ignores. Later on, during the loners’ raid on the hotel, David exposes John’s lies to Nosebleed Woman. She and John are currently midway through the mandatory trial period of their new relationship but the film avoids explaining the consequences of David’s revelation. Back in the woods, Short Sighted Woman is blinded by the loners’ leader as a punishment for her affair with David. The lovers put the leader in a grave, leave the woods and return to the City. In the washroom of a restaurant there, David stands in front of a mirror: he has to decide whether or not to blind himself (with restaurant cutlery) in order to validate his new partnership. The Lobster ends at this point. Lanthimos demonstrates, as he did in Dogtooth, his skill in composing a finale which is immediately compelling and which forces the viewer, rather than the writers of the film, to work out what happened after the closing credits rolled.
As David, Colin Farrell is more effective than I expected although he has to rely on visual decoration to a considerable extent: he’s grown a grubby moustache, put on weight and specs. (His characterisation would be weakened if the woebegone David wore contact lenses instead.) Farrell is still rather easy to upstage and this certainly happens when he’s sharing the screen with Ben Whishaw’s quietly single-minded, affecting John. Whishaw has a great ability to tune into and express, it seems effortlessly, the particular intelligence of the character he’s playing (I was all the more aware of this seeing The Lobster only three days after Suffragette). Otherwise, it’s the women who register most strongly here – Olivia Colman, Jessica Barden (her naturally eccentric quality serves her very well as Nosebleed Woman), Ashley Jensen (touching and funny in the role of the ill-fated Biscuit Woman). Rachel Weisz, as well as playing Short Sighted Woman, is the voiceover narrator. She reads with fine control; the rhythm of her delivery of lines when she’s on screen is mesmerising too although it also gives Weisz a somewhat android quality that I couldn’t make sense of. The Lobster, although it’s eventually disappointing, confirms Yorgos Lanthimos – whose first English-language picture this is and who is now based in London – as an unusually interesting film-maker. One more amusing thing about the experience of watching the movie came from realising that most of the people in the Curzon Soho audience were (like me) unaccompanied.
22 October 2015
