Are you single? No? Good. Because if you are, you'll be sent to a camp, where singles have 45 days to search around for a suitable bachelor or bachelorette. If you failed, you'll be transformed into an animal.
Sounds absurd? Well, that was the premise of "The Lobster," an English-language debut of Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth, Alps). In this new world, citizens can't be single. Being single is a criminal act.
Looks like Yorgos Lanthimos loves to unveil unusual patterns of human relationships. In Dogtooth, he displayed the parents who keep their children bizarrely cloistered from the world. In Alps, he pointed out a bizarre idea that humans can be replaced. These stories wouldn't make any sense at all. Maybe that is the reason why Lanthimos designed a dystopia, built a distance from the social context in the real world.
The Plot
David (Colin Farrell) recently been dumped by his wife. As the law, he had to settle in a camp called The Hotel to find a new partner. The next scene shows David checking into a hotel, answering a series of extremely intimate questions about his personal life. He has a time limit of 45 days. During that time, he faced various rules and weird daily life, all designed for him to immediately get a romantic partner. If he fails, then he will be transformed into an animal. David chooses to become a lobster, due to his love of the sea.
David befriends a couple: a lisping man played by John C. Reilly and a limping man played by Ben Whishaw. The search for a romantic partner is not easy. There are strict rules. The lisp-er mate should be a couple with another lisp-er and the limp-er should find another limp-er. But there is still a little tolerance, The 45 days rule can be extended by hunting and tranquilizing the single people who live in the forest; each captured "loner" earns them a day.
Later in the film, he finally meets a woman and starts a relationship with her. The two are shifted to the couples' suite. But somehow, she concludes their relationship is a lie and drags him to the hotel manager to have him punished by turning him into an animal. However, he escapes and joins the loners in the woods.
Long story shorts, because there are too many adventures (trying to write with no spoilers), David finally meet a real romantic partner, he begins a secret relationship with a blind woman (Rachel Weisz). However, the forest is too wild, and same with the hotel, it has so many rules. The loners are led by the emotionless leader (Léa Seydoux). In contrast to the hotel's rules, they forbid any romance, with mutilation as a punishment. So David and the blind woman escape to the city, but he will face a new problem, seeking to reestablish sameness with the woman he loves. They fall in love at the right time but in the wrong place.
The Romance and The Lies
The need of having a partner, in the Kafkaesque world of The Lobster, is all about the existence of human being. Being single is not just an anomaly, it is inhuman. To be honest, watching this film made me realize what happens to the world around. Women in her 40s might feel something wrong with them if they were not married. There is a stigma about being an "old virgin". There are similar problems with men too. But in this patriarchy world, women seem suffered more. When it comes to marriage and age, there’s a serious double standard for men and women. Men are often told to wait to get married until they feel ready — until they’re mature..
Unfortunately, finding a right partner for life is not an easy matter, especially with a tight deadline. No wonder The Lobster is filled with depressive scenes, from pretending to have something in common with a prospective partner, to suicide scenes. In The Lobster, such lies demand a high price to pay. David had to lost his brother (in a very grotesque manner), while his lisp-er friend always had to make his nose bleed constantly, to match with his partner's perpetual nosebleed. All of these are the result of lies in order to have a partner. Or in other words, the lies in order to be a human.
Little fake does not hurt. It's just adding a flavor to human interaction, such as wearing a lot of filters in a profile photo or pretend to know a famous person to impress someone. But we know that this little lies can be uncovered at any time. Besides the lies, of course, there are many other things that can be extracted from each character in The Lobster. The easiest one to spot would be the institutionalized setting, the story world. Lanthimos has made a world where rules acted as the basis for human civilization. The world needs a system to keep everything in order. While we were laughing at the poor characters in the movie, eventually, we were laughing at our self. The story is so absurd, but social pressure to find the perfect one and settle down can be just as sad as loneliness. Isn't life itself absurd too?
The Lobster is a 2015 film directed, co-written, and co-produced by Yorgos Lanthimos, co-produced by Ceci Dempsy, Ed Guiney, and Lee Magiday, and co-written by Efthimis Filippou. It was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival and won the Jury Prize. It was shown in the Special Presentations section of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival. The film was nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the 89th Academy Awards and for Outstanding British Film at the 69th British Academy Film Awards. (wikipedia)