The Lobster
Ever since I am (yet again) living in an English-speaking country and the only German-speaking friend I have here is leaving, I have been contemplating blogging in German, but I am not fully convinced about the idea. I am not confident that I will ever feel as comfortable blogging in German as I am in English, and I am a little afraid of such a huge change for this blog that I have been kind of running for almost 10 years now. Does anybody non-German speaking even read this blog still?
As always, it takes me awhile to finally write a review of a film. In this case, we are leaving for a trip to Hokkaido tomorrow (actually in a few hours since we get up at 5am), and it seems prudent to write this posting before my thoughts on the film are completely overtaken by impressions from our 2 week long trip. We watched “The Lobster” a couple weeks ago, after Joanna Goddard mentioned it on her infamous blog (my current favorite which now makes me even more girlish than I ever was). Pip and I liked the premise so much that we started watching the film a day later. It was surprisingly fortuitous, and now that I always choose to watch an opera over a movie, it is necessary for a strong force of inspiration to make me watch a film. Typically, it’s pure curiosity and the promise of discovering something completely radical and new. I don’t get excited enough about the idea of watching another film by some director I already know well, or more films of actors I like (there aren’t that many of them anymore, and Gael Garcia Bernal’s new great project is a TV show after all). Half of 2016 is over and I watched an amazing total of two movies, “L’ombre des femmes” and “The Lobster”, and for both cases it was this kind of completely random choice of film.
In fact, I have never seen “Dogtooth” or anything else by Lanthimos, heck I didn’t even know his name and that it was associated with “Dogtooth”. As a result, I have never seen anything like “The Lobster”, though the parallel society with drastic consequences on humanity reminded me a little of “Never let me go”. The intriguing premise can be summarized quite shortly: Single people are not allowed in this society, so if you are single you end up in a hotel with 45 days given to you to find a new mate. If you don’t manage to do so, you get turned into an animal of your choosing. The best aspect of the film is its humorous world-building, in which we get to meet our protagonist, the other guests, the hotel managers and workers through the lens of hilarious absurdity. Pip also noticed very quickly that the film is meticulously shot; there are a lot of Wes-Anderson-like symmetrical views, though the comparison is really unfair to Lanthimos because it’s not like he has any reason to copy Anderson. More importantly, when the big breakpoint towards the middle of the film happens (David’s attempt to flee the hotel), the symmetry is broken and the asymmetrical shots are purposefully set to create a sort of unease within the viewer when the protagonist finally decides to break with the system, an strict system which seems so absurd in our eyes that black humor seems to naturally arise from it. I typically tend to say that I find it difficult to laugh at black humor, especially the Scandinavian type. It’s cool and often funny but it does not make me laugh out loud (nor it is supposed to, I guess). In this film, I thought the humorous parts in the first half were absolutely brilliant, and a part of me wishes the film could have forgone its main plotline and just be about the shenanigans of the hotel. We get a lot of glimpses into the lives of the people in the hotel, but I think the concept is enough for an entire TV series, that is for sure.
This is definitely one of these science fiction stories that make you wonder about our own lives as well. Everybody in the film waxes poetic on the beauty of love (or rather “coupledom”) not too unlike some members of our society, and the film offers multiple ways to criticize the idolization of romantic relationships, both in the world of “The Lobster” and in ours. On one side, we have the absurd fixation of the city people on being part of a couple; and on the other side, there is the Loners’s hatred for any form of romantic relationship. Most absurdly, perhaps, is the notion that a couple must have something in common. It’s the first thing we hear in the film (“Is he short-sighted too?”) and while the protagonist comes a long way resisting every system he is in (first the hotel and then the loners), this is a doctrine that absolutely nobody in the entire film ever questions. For everybody in that world, either relationships are everything or relationships suck and are an abomination, but it is always absolutely clear what they are based on: common ground. I thought that was fascinating on so many levels, because in our world the lofty ideals of romantic love are not supposed to be based on some common characteristics, but something like, uh, irrational infatuation. It’s actually reality that teaches us that a couple should have a lot in common to function, though the similarities should be a little deeper than “we both have nosebleeds often” or “we both like biscuits” or “we both have beautiful voices”, and it’s this absurdity that makes me believe that Lanthimos is very deliberately using such a view on relationships to question our own.
So if you were forced to be turned into an animal, which animal would you choose? For me, it’s a tie between a house cat and a bonobo.