Totalitarian Love
Yorgos Lanthimos’s strange and original films observe and reflect the
culture in which we live. At the same time they create a parallel,
fanciful world by taking our social institutions, our common
experiences, and our deepest emotions—and pushing them to their
illogical extreme.
In his mesmerizing second film, Dogtooth (2009), which was
nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film, a father and mother are
raising three adolescent children amid the middle-class comforts of
suburban Athens—and in total isolation. The parents create and edit
their family’s reality and give ordinary words new meanings, often with
weirdly comical results. When the kids wonder about the planes buzzing
overhead, the parents arrange to have toy planes plop into their back
yard. Dad asks if they want to hear their grandpa singing, and,
straight-faced, plays them a scratchy recording of Frank Sinatra
crooning “Fly Me to the Moon.” Even or especially when there is love,
the family is a prison, and Lanthimos makes it a jail from which the
only escape requires heroic determination—and violence.
His next film, Alps (2012), looks at death with the same
peculiar, funny and compassionate eye with which its predecessor
regarded the family. A group of four people who take the names of alpine
mountains (their leader calls himself Mont Blanc) operate a small
business that combines financial and humanitarian concerns. They (rather
loosely) impersonate the dead. Clothed in the favorite outfits and
accessories of the dead, they enact little playlets in which they say
the sorts of things the dead used to say. This service can be utilized
by grieving families and lonely survivors who—for a fee, though the
first five visits are free—can have their sorrow assuaged by tender and
nostalgic interactions with these “substitutes” pretending to be their
lost loved ones. Inevitably, the Alps’s enterprise is subverted by the
ways in which grief is destabilizing and contagious, and by the living’s
desire to be loved and cherished as much as the dead.
Lanthimos’s new film, The Lobster—which won the Grand Jury
Prize for Best Screenplay at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and which
recently made its American debut at the New York Film Festival—takes on
the subject of modern love. It posits a dystopian near-future in which
it has become illegal not to be part of a couple. One can be
heterosexual or homosexual, as long as one is in some kind of
relationship. Those without a partner are remanded to a fortress-like
Irish country hotel: a cross between a singles resort and an internment
camp. Each prisoner-guest is given forty-five days to find a soul mate.
Those who remain unattached are sent to the Transformation Room, where
they will be turned into whatever animal they choose to become, and set
loose to live in the forest.
Our hero, David, says he would like to be turned into a lobster
because it lives for a very long time, because it makes its home at the
bottom of the sea, which he likes, because lobsters have blue blood like
aristocrats, and because the lobster remains fertile for much of its
life. He remains unfazed when, later in the film, another character, in a
moment of pique, points out that David will likely be caught, boiled,
and eaten, his shell cracked and the meat removed from his claws.
Expertly played by Colin Farrell, who has been rendered nearly
unrecognizable by a moustache, eyeglasses, a goofy haircut, weight gain,
and a tentative shuffling gait, David is a dejected architect, recently
divorced by his wife. Accompanied by his dog which, we will later
discover, was formerly his brother, he arrives at the hotel, surrenders
his clothing and possessions, and is given the first lesson in how
“everything is easier in pairs.” He must spend his first twenty-four
hours at the hotel with one arm tied behind his back, obliged to perform
the small daily activities (undressing, going to the bathroom) that
would be much simpler with someone to help him.
This unpleasant instruction is reinforced at a group meeting, where
the audience watches brief skits illustrating the perils of solitude. A
man dines alone, chokes on his food, and dies; the man dines with his
wife, who performs the Heimlich maneuver and saves him. A woman walks
alone and is set upon by a rapist; the woman walks with her husband and
remains unmolested.
The new arrivals introduce themselves with short speeches in which
they list their distinguishing characteristics: in most cases, a defect.
Two men who befriend David are identified only as Lisping Man (John C.
Reilly) and Limping Man (Ben Whishaw). It is understood that the
unattached will seek partners who share their disabilities—presumably a
comment on contemporary dating culture and the online sites that
encourage the single to describe their tastes and preferences, indulge
their narcissism, and to search for a mirror rather than for the other.
As Limping Man courts Nosebleed Woman, we watch how desperation can
inspire the lovelorn to lie about who they are.
Among the recreational activities/obligatory torments offered by the
hotel is a hunt in which the guests are given tranquilizer guns and
transported by bus to the forest to track down and shoot the Loners—a
tribe of rogue single people. But lest we imagine the Loners as the
rebel heroes of this comic critique of social control, we soon discover
they are no less rigid, intolerant, and punitive than those who enforce
the conventional norm. Their leader (Léa Seydoux) is as righteous,
beautiful, and cruel as the bad queen in a fairy tale. For, Lanthimos
appears to be suggesting, our desire to make everyone else live exactly
as we do has more to do with power, control, and group identity than
with the actual substance of how we think others should lead their
lives.
Lanthimos trusts the viewer to connect the dots, get the jokes, and
understand the initially bewildering scenes for which no explanation is
given. The shocking opening sequence—a woman who appears nowhere else in
the film stops her car along a country road, gets out, and shoots a
grazing donkey point blank—becomes clear when we realize that she is not
simply committing a random act of animal cruelty but settling a score
with the human being whom the donkey used to be, in a previous life.
At a question and answer session following the film’s screening at
Lincoln Center, a woman asked Lanthimos if he had instructed his actors
to seem dispassionate. The director and the cast members who joined him
on stage, Rachel Weisz (who plays a nearsighted Loner and narrates
sections of the film in voice-over) and Ariane Labed (who has appeared
in earlier Lanthimos films and here plays a maid at the hotel),
questioned the word dispassionate, correctly pointing out that
the film is extremely romantic. But one knows what the woman in the
audience meant. A great deal of the humor and pathos in Lanthimos’s
films comes from the deadpan seriousness, the slightly rushed and
monotonous line readings with which characters say the most outrageous
things, and the equally straight-faced blankness with which their
listeners accept statements that may strike us (if not them) as
hilariously bizarre. After the Hotel Manager (played by Olivia Colman)
calmly lays out the rules of the establishment and the punishment for
not “making it,” she sensibly explains a few of the fine points. One’s
choice of the animal to become in the next life will affect one‘s
chances of finding a mate when one is transformed into that creature and
sent into the wild. Most people want to become dogs, she says, which is
why there are so many dogs. But “a wolf and a penguin can’t be
together, nor a camel and a hippo. That would be absurd.”
Lanthimos’s films often contain such disturbing moments of
unexpected, startling violence that people who have never been able to
watch Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex to the end might be wise to spare
themselves. Like Sophocles, Lanthimos understands that sudden
self-mutilation generates a particular kind of adrenaline in the viewer.
Consequently, the director’s fans learn to brace themselves every time
one of his characters stands in front of a mirror.
Sex and dance scenes (of which there are many in Lanthimos’s work)
are so awkwardly choreographed that lovers and dancers seem as twitchy
and graceless as marionettes. In Dogtooth, the manic ballet
that the two sisters perform to celebrate their parents’ anniversary
strikes us as exactly the duet that might be created by girls who had
never seen other people move their bodies to music. There’s a good deal
of graceless and quasi-robotic dancing in The Lobster and
impersonal, mechanical sex, though there is one highly romantic and
erotic scene in which a pair of lovers begin to kiss passionately on the
couch at the city apartment of the Loner Leader’s parents, while the
parents are playing a guitar duet for their guests.
Lanthimos’s approach to sex and dance, as with so many elements in
his films, make us feel that he is stripping away the familiar
conventions of filmmaking (the gauzy love scene, the seemingly
effortless grace of Fred Astaire) to show us something at once familiar
and entirely new. Dipping into the past to borrow from Greek tragedy,
picturing the future as a surreal and horrific exaggeration of the
present, The Lobster frightens and entertains, saddens and
inspirits us—in this case with a final vision of self-sacrifice and
devotion that ultimately transcends society’s attempts to commodify and
regulate the mystery of love.
The Lobster premiered in the US at the 2015 New York Film Festival and will be released in other theaters in spring 2016.
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