Imagine a world where marriage is mandated even in the absence of love—or just save yourself the trouble and go see the new film, The Lobster. Directed by the Greek satirist Yorgos Lanthimos (Oscar-nominated in 2011 for his provocative Dogtooth) and starring a paunchy, mustachioed Colin Farrell, The Lobster posits just such a dystopian future, where singleness is outlawed, yet authentic and loving relationships are impossibly hard to come by. At times hilarious and at times appalling, Lanthimos’s bizarre voice and directorial vision offer a twisted commentary on the business of finding love in the twenty first century.
Per the draconian rules of the movie’s futuristic society, Farrell’s character, recently divorced, is checked into a hotel for singles and given 45 days to find a new romantic partner from among the guests. To make matters more difficult, a match between lovers is only deemed valid if the couple shares some defining secondary characteristic (bad eyesight, susceptibility to nosebleeds, insensitivity to the suffering of others). Should he fail to mate within the time limit, he’ll be turned into an animal of his choosing. (His choice, as you may have guessed: a lobster.)
To this humorous premise Lanthimos applies a thick coat of misanthropy. The film gets much of its early mileage from scenes of casual violence and emotionless sexuality (it may be more accurate to call it anti-sexuality) abetted by gleefully inappropriate musical cues and unsettling framing. The real horror comes not from the black comedy, but from the lack of any recognizably authentic emotion between hotel guests. The Lobster is at its strongest when commenting on mating as something that has been stripped of spontaneity and reduced to a mechanical process. The film holds up a mirror to the pornification and app-ification of relationships in our own world, and the image we see is all the more unsettling for how familiar it can feel.
Eventually Farrell does have a brush with something more akin to true love. A mid-movie change of scenery finds him traveling with a band of nomadic loners and falling in love with Rachel Weisz, albeit against the rules of this equally ruthless society of rogue single people. While the love story in this half of the film ought to be a welcome change of pace from the wall-to-wall provocations of the first half, The Lobster goes strangely limp at this point. Though the film is consistently a visual curiosity until the end, it loses much of its intellectual vigor and never quite regains the lost energy after shifting gears to this forbidden romance plot.
By some strange coincidence, The Lobster opens in theatres the same time as another cinematic satire of marriage. Whit Stillman’s Love and Friendship, an adaptation of an unfinished Austen novella, similarly presents a society where strict social mores govern the workings of love and marriage. In Stillman’s film, the freshly-widowed Lady Susan (played with withering wit by Kate Beckinsale), puts up the appearance of playing by society’s rules while working to subvert them in the name of acquiring her heart’s desire—a husband for herself, and for her daughter.
Like Lanthimos, Stillman uses humor to poke all sorts of fun at models of courtship and falling in love. But whereas the Greek director relies on the shock of transgressive visuals, Whitman crafts poisonous barbs out of language, a mixture of his own and Austen’s. Not to compare apples to oranges, but the maturity of Stillman and Austen’s observations about human relationships and the uproarious effect of their combined verbal wit cast an unflattering light on some of Lanthimos’ more pointless provocations. Lanthimos knows how to effectively stage a cruel joke, but sustaining sophisticated ideas across an entire film is less of his strong suit.
Stillman’s sense of humor isn’t intended to shock, but neither is it inconsequential. Though the ultimately victorious Lady Susan is never presented as a paragon of morality, her story offers a moral for everyone around her: the heart is an instrument we can’t quite control. On this point The Lobster seems to agree, as its bleak atmosphere offers a warning derived from the same observation. Try as you might to routinize and mechanize the movements of falling in love, you’ll only succeed in suppressing the mystery that makes true love, and true joy with it, possible.
