One of the great things about The Lobster is that it never comes right out and explains all the rules by which its world works, instead showing it to us in action, letting us scrounge up meaning by assembling bits and pieces scattered across the whole feature. What we know at the beginning is that David (Colin Farrell), the only human in the movie to receive a name, is checking into a hotel with a dog named Bob. The dog used to be his brother. See, the way the hotel works, is that single people (David's just been through a divorce) check in for 45 days, attempting to find a suitable partner from among the other single guests. At the end of their time, they are transformed into the animal of their choosing - David wants to be a lobster, since they live for a long time, and he likes the sea.
How the hell this system came into being, how it works, and if, indeed, the source of all non-human animals in the world are these hapless single folks (that's strongly implied at least once), are among the mysteries The Lobster has zero interest in pursuing. This is all straightforwardly metaphorical anyway: the arbitrary, high-stakes rules of the hotel, and the society we eventually see in which people who aren't romantically attached are judged to be so clearly perverse that they're literally outlawed, are a sardonic mirror image of our own world full of high pressure to find a mate and live a normal life, regardless of whether it's a pleasant fit or not. One of the first things we learn about the hotel is that it offers little room for individual foibles: David can't sign in as bisexual, and he can't even get shoes in half-sizes. Pairings are made according to the most trivial connections, and tested in ludicrous settings. It's a world in which finding the right mate doesn't matter, finding a good enough mate is the only thing anyone cares about. Meanwhile, the outlaw Loners haunting the woods outside the hotel are just as narrow-minded, from the opposite direction: relying emotionally on others is a failing, and finding any kind of real connection between people is a cardinal sin.
The movie portrays a world not just centered around idiotic, arbitrary hoops that we're all forced to jump through in the pursuit of romantic relationships; it's about a world in which we aren't allowed to be ourselves at all. This is never specified in the script by Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou, happily; it's something that's allowed to simply bleed in through the edges, particularly in the performances by the extraordinary cast - including Ben Whishaw, John C. Reilly, Ashley Jensen, and Angeliki Papoulia as the most important of David's fellow guests, and Léa Seydoux as the tyrannical leader of the Loners - which all revolve around a unified core of incredible, studied disaffection. The film is narrated, mostly, by Rachel Weisz, who also plays the Loner woman that David inevitably falls in love with; her delivery of the narration starts out in the most abrasive way possible, sounding impatient and bossy, telling us a story like she's disgusted with us for having asked her about it. Pretty soon, though, it's clear that everybody in the film talks this way: slightly angry, robotic tones that feel directed everywhere but at the heart. At one point, Weisz narrates David's observation that it's easier to pretend not to feel something than to pretend to feel, and the acting throughout The Lobster follows suit: everybody involved is clearly trying not to feel as hard as they possibly can.
So what we have, then, is a fable about how being a functional member of society can readily involve swallowing down your personality as much as possible and being as far from your true self as you can manage; that's a lesson that goes beyond just the dismal quest to find true love, though the fact that Lanthimos and Filippou frame it in those terms gives the whole thing that much more of a bleak, nasty bite (pound for pound, I think this is an even crueler film than Dogtooth, in part because it is so much more surgical and less grotesque). Not bad for a comedy: a vigorously mean comedy, one in which a man pantomiming his lack of revulsion at the thought of kicking animals to death is meant to be funny; one in which the broadest, most friendly gag comes when the hotel manager (Olivia Colman) announces that couples having irreconcilable fights will be provided with a child, since adding children is always good for the stability of marriages (this is, in fact, my least-favorite part of The Lobster - it all but comes with an ironic "wah-wah" sound effect. But it's still, relatively, the cheeriest gag in the movie). A black comedy, in fact, though "black" still implies more light than the film emits.
Still, it's compulsively watchable, beautiful to look at and astonishingly well-crafted. It's confident and fearless in its subtle world-building, its commitment to an unpleasant tone, and the smart way it follows the scenario through to a logical conclusion - finding that taking a stance as oneself, knowing one's own needs and being proud to present them to the world, can still be a horrible, traumataising, alienating process - that provides the shape of a happy ending without the emotional uplift. It's sublimely gorgeous: Thimios Bakatakis's frighteningly crisp digital cinematography of the Irish coast and forests offers terrific compositions and at time hopelessly florid lighting, but all within a tightly constrained palette. The film looks as chilly and strangled as its characters behave, with even the most poppy colors - rich wood tone, bright blue flowers on the womens' dresses, the green of trees - feeling dredged in a coating of metallic grey. I loved it, even when it was making my stomach churn (which was surprisingly often - takes a lot for a movie to turn a passionate make-out scene into the stuff of a horrifying thriller, but The Lobster catapults past that mark), and I am well aware that most people will not; but boy, do I want to force it on as many people as I can possibly manage.
10/10
Would only that it were called the Palme Dog.
ReplyDeleteIt...honestly would never have crossed my mind to describe that ending as "happy". "Abrupt" and "uncomfortable" are the words that first come to mind, albeit clearly deliberately and possibly ingeniously so (I'll need to see the film one more time to make up my mind on that front).
ReplyDeleteOh, and since we get to choose our new animal forms, I would totally be a rat.
Until this very second, I never noticed the lack of an "e" on Palm Dog.
ReplyDeleteBut it totally exists and this film totally won it.
Or the first runner-up, anyway.
ReplyDeleteI'm with Scampy. There is no possible reading of that ending - after having seen the film twice, once with Miami International Film Festival and once during its run here in New York City - that could come off as happy. If anything, it comes across as the cruelest and most provocative moment in the whole film:
ReplyDeleteVAGUE SPOILERS
As it challenges the audience and David himself to deal with the question of whether this really is love and whether what he's expected to do for the Near-Sighted Woman really worth it? And it refuses to acknowledge our answer as it abruptly closes.
It's pretty much the successor to the scene where the Loner Leader confronts the Hotel Manager and her husband.
Saw this last year in the UK. It was nominated for best british film at the BAFTAs. That the pedestrian Brooklyn won is scandalous.
ReplyDeleteI saw this on a date. I repeat, it was a date-night movie.
ReplyDeleteSo the movie finishes and I'm sitting there wondering how to romance up the rest of the night after watching something that just so skewered the rituals of courtship it's making everything we've previously been doing seem pathetic and everything we are supposed to do now seem even more pathetic and forced.
And...it turns out my date thought the movie was a comedy and got that it had a sad worldview and greatly enjoyed it in spite that view. And I think back over and realize: that's right, the movie was funny. Like really, really funny.
Remember that scene where John C. Reilly mentions what animal he would like to be? And the prissy fight that follows because of Wishaw's response to that? Theater was laughing hard.
So there you go, it doesn't naturally have to be the bleak, nihilistic portrait of relationships that everybody is painting it to be. I know it didn't ruin our night ;)
Comment, part 1: This movie is probably one of the most hardcore exercises in safe, middle-class detachment masquerading as insightful critique that I've ever seen. There was something about it that struck me as familiar, what with the really well-shot scenes of hunting and the masterfully edited structuring which did such an excellent job of communicating that, yes, this is a joke, laugh here, or (and sometimes at once), this is brutal, right? Isn't this so twisted? And I was like, oh, hello Game of Thrones, hello torture porn, hello every cold & observational indie film about a reg'lar middle class dude who's been dealt a blow by life (so unfair!) and goes about navigating the treacheries of his cut-throat society while ignoring his own complicity in it.
ReplyDeleteThe most positive thing I can say about The Lobster is that it does an amazing job of drawing out hypocrisy, and it does this by being absolutely, pointedly misanthropic (the disaffection of the acting lures us into de-humanizing the characters, thinking of them as emotionally stunted and as much--if not more--animals as the ones they've chosen to turn into), at the same time that it is structured and timed as a comedy. This basically means that you're being told you should laugh at the suffering being shown, at the same time that that suffering is depicted in a visceral, gut-coiling fashion. To top it off, it's at least very technically sound in terms of cinematography, if not exquisite; meaning that critics and cinephiles have something 'objective' to latch onto while praising it for being edgy, insightful, original, etc.
I've been following this blog for a long time, and I've enjoyed both Tim's attention to technical description and observation, and his analysis along lines of theme, psychological content, social messaging. Tim has claimed (if I remember correctly) that he analyses films more along lines of technical merit than any kind of moral content. At the same time, he doesn't hesitate to call BS when a film is being sexist, racist, queer-phobic, etc. And most of the time, those two approaches--approaching from an amoral, technical standpoint, on the one hand, and a moral, social justice-informed critique on the other--don't conflict much with one another. And most of the critics I enjoy reading are similar in overall style. The Lobster is a film that from the ground up seems to be constructed to make all writers like this look idiotic, really, really callous, or both, because it uses its technical prowess, quirky premise, and clear--or rather, astoundingly obvious--social analysis to justify what I can only call a kind of voyeurism of suffering, the constant excuse for which is that by showing things viscerally and without sympathy, it's being 'realistic' to the underlying misanthropy and nihilism of the world, since it's a dog-eat-dog world out there, and there's not actually a moral bedrock to things and the society we've built as a result is pretty twisted (see: Game of Thrones).
What gives the game away is the 'social critique' aspect of the film. Like, The Lobster isn't smart, y'all, I'm sorry. What it's saying is really obvious and kind of vapid. Yeah, heteronormativity is restrictive and arbitrary and cruel when systemically enforced, especially with the threat of violence. Does that excuse the movie from literally excising queerness from itself? (Sorry, but being told very clearly that I'm not going to be represented doesn't make me feel any better about being erased. Also, you don't score points with me by telling me you're aware of that erasure being shitty when you're, uh, erasing me.) Yeah, our society is really structured around romantic coupling, and yeah, it's pretty crappy that people are pressured into romance because of anything from declining birth-rates to just the fact that officially-sanctioned couples get a lot of perks that single people don't have, perks that shouldn't exist as perks because they should be distributed to all (looking at the film's jokes about personal safety here). But is this really news to anyone? Like, who exactly is going to gain valuable insight into the ills of society or whatever by watching this film? Or are we only just being reminded in a very visceral, very heavy handed way of the abusive and absurd qualities of institutionalized heteronormative monogamy?
ReplyDeleteThis film is what's sometimes called an Aesop--it's a really obvious analogy or metaphor thats seems to be designed to teach us something, make a critique, provide an insight, etc. But it's a broken Aesop because the metaphor is so extreme in its construction that it seems to refer to real-world parallels pretty loosely. Like, yeah bisexuality isn't really mainstream, but it's being included in online dating services like OKCupid, which are one of the big things this film is lampooning (see also: "My defining characteristic is..."). What a broken Aesop does, by virtue of its distance from the real world, is it allows the viewer a kind of detachment, a safe space from the critique that the Aesop is designed to make. The benefits of an Aesop (pedagogy via the reduction of complexity) get undercut by absurdity; when you think an Aesop's premise is absurd, you're less inclined to think any lessons it holds apply. The Lobster is pretty high on the absurdity meter. I mean, people get turned into animals if they don't couple within, how many days? People all reduce themselves to a single defining characteristic in order to appeal to each other. People all talk like robots.
I can't say whether the brokenness of the film as an Aesop, i.e. as a social critique, is by design. It very well may be. The point is, that brokenness provides a safe haven for those who would otherwise be at the sharp end of a critique. It allows you to feel like you aren't complicit in the proceedings. And let's look at those proceedings. A woman's blackness is played as a joke. Various disabilities are played as jokes. The protagonist pretending to be unaffected by a woman's gruesome suicide is played as a joke, after his casting of her suicidal thoughts as pathetic or at least irritating is played as a joke. His similar coldness when watching a woman choke is played as a joke when we discover she was only pretending. Sexual assault is a punchline.
Great to read this review finally come along. Is there any hope of an Arabian Nights review coming along eventually, seeing as all three volumes are on Netflix now?
ReplyDeleteHayley's comment is a perfect example of this film's effect. She realized, while watching the film, that it was a critique of the kind of relationship she was in. But though she was made aware of and a little uncomfortable about the absurdity of her own situation, the movie was able to get her to laugh and enjoy that critique because of the extremity of its absurdist elements, even though those absurdist elements came at the expense of others in a worse situation (the 'prissy fight' came as a result of John C. Reilly's character being insulted because of his lisp; that same character was later assaulted in a pretty gruesome way, and one wonders if the director would have chosen him as the target of that scene if it weren't for his lisp).
ReplyDeleteThis movie has been praised as a smart and funny 'black comedy' (in order to at least acknowledge its brutality), but the sheer extent of its viciousness is scarcely acknowledged. That's because the film forces you to choose between enjoying it for its technical merit and quirky premise, and digging it for what is supposedly a sharp social critique; and calling attention to how its punchlines are almost all regarding the suffering of people in marginalized categories or otherwise shittier situations than yours. It forces you to choose because the societal critique on offer, the humor, and the brutality, are all intertwined. One must ask, why do so many people talk so much about two of those things and seem to minimize the other? Why does that talk end in praise instead of concern or horror?
Because the movie allows the audience to detach themselves, and encourages their complicity via laughter, and that complicity prevents them from being able to point fingers at the movie, because they would also be pointing fingers at themselves and the fact of their laughter. I felt erased and excluded at the beginning of the movie, when it told me I couldn't be represented. Then I felt physically unsafe because the atmosphere that followed elicited laughter from the audience regarding things that I just didn't think were funny. I don't think I've ever been made to feel unsafe in my seat by a movie, even horror movies that are all about scaring you. I've never felt so unsafe from other members in the audience because they could laugh at things I found horrifying and unfunny.
The Lobster is really well made. I don't think it's very smart, though. I think it tries to get you to think that in order to provide you an excuse to use on its behalf. Maybe it's very aware that it's getting people who are safe from its brutality to offer their complicity with open hands. Maybe it's actually an intentional joke on them, because critics who usually try to juggle praise for technical merit, and admonishment about laughing at the expense of victimhood, are forced to choose one or the other, and their actual, personal detachment makes them fall consistently on one side.
Anyway, I think I'm going to create a good, healthy distance between myself and Tim's blog from now on, just as I'm going to create a good, healthy distance between myself and people who laughed at all the film's intended punchlines, because I get the sense that when push comes to shove, they've placed themselves at a safe enough distance from the suffering depicted therein in order to praise something that, while well-made, isn't nearly smart or insightful enough to justify its own violence.
I appreciated the movie on a technical level and the way it explored the possibilities of its weird premise, but I could not warm to its, well, chilliness. For a story so concerned about love, or at least the social pressures and rituals built around it, there was very little actual love or passion on display, even among the central couple who are supposed to be pushing against society's awful strictures. In the end, their relationship is built on yet another arbitrary commonality--near-sightedness. And that elliptical ending! I know Europeans aren't big on closure or catharsis, but there should be at least something to make us feel like everything that happened meant something. Even Anomalisa managed to end with the idea of there being something more to the world than emotional suffocation.
ReplyDelete