Let me start this text, sharing that for me "The Lobster" is a complicated and disturbing film. The more I think about it, the more it stop being funny and ridiculous. If anyone interprets it only as social satire, I would be angry. If someone else labels it as a dystopia, it will be boring to me. None of these critical approaches work in favor of a full understanding of the film. All of them are only partially true because it's from movies whose value is more than their component parts. As a universal key that opens many doors. There is a tough and tangible presence of spoilers, so be warned. In short, the plot: David (Colin Farrell) was just dropped by a woman with whom he had a relationship that lasted for 11 years and 1 month. The rules in the world in which David lives (an absolutely non-futuristic environment, cities and landscapes, as we know them today) are that people can not live in society without having a girlfriend. So he's sent to the hotel - a place where you stay for 45 days with the purpose of finding a mate. If you fail, the hotel managers turn you into an animal of your choice. In the case of David this is a lobster. "Because lobsters live 100 years old and have blue blood, like the aristocrats." The film draws its core charge from its absurd atmosphere and does not hide it for a moment. Both the actors, the camera, the music and the shooting locations - everything is measured to be both meaningful and stylish in sync with the desired sense of sterility and absurdity. The first frame makes you feel uncomfortable, and it's just the beginning of a series of what I just watch moments, which eventually gets used quickly, and the story goes in front of the viewer, becoming more and more purposeful and mostly entertaining .
The character of Colin Farrell goes through two distinctly different (at first look) spaces over the sequel to the film. The first is the Hotel - a cozy outbuilding outside, inside a social and soulless, where people in their unnatural and apathetic are behaving like a rolling décor. In the Hotel, the rules are the same: you try to find a person who looks like you to become a couple as soon as possible. It is always the case that the pairs in the film are built on the basis of similar defects. An extremely interesting concept I think I see for the first time. Ben Weishu's character, who first finds a half, mimics bleeding from his nose (bumping his face in walls and desks) to "take down" the heroine of Jessica Barden, where her bleeding comes naturally. Because they both bleed "spontaneously", they are all the perfect pair. And David has to lie to him so he can get in touch and not be turned into a lobster - he imitates the Angeliki Papoulia similar to her heartlessness. The two watched as a woman threw herself out of the window of her room and held a discontented but monotonous little talk about how terrible she had decided to commit suicide right now because David could not sleep from screaming. In the end, however, the heartless woman manages to reveal his lie and pronounces one of the most prominent words about the mechanics of the film: "No relationship can be a lie," a lie is small or big.
The second space that our hero is in is the forest. We should think that the forest will be paradise, but no paradise is inhabited by humans. Among the trees live the rebels - those who have vowed never to fall in love and live each for themselves. All empathy is forbidden, and tenderness is considered a treachery of the value system. Sadly, but the understanding of Loneliness for happiness is just the reverse side of a really rusty coin. The Forest and the Hotel are actually very similar - both structures are totalitarian in their oppression, completely devoid of emotional intelligence and desperately atrophied for any change. "The Lobster" is a beautiful film, but not in the cathartic way that you tear down your tears, and you are grateful that what you've seen brings you to such an emotional whirlwind. That's why I would not say that the film is a drama, though it's dramatic. I would not say it is a tragedy, even though it is tragically crushing. And although the plot suggests the human-animal transformation, we really do not see any hint of any spiritual or physical purification or pathway - all that happens is that the protagonist falls from one hell to another without drawing conclusions about what and why it's happening to him. There are hypotheses (and that is why I say that the film is beautiful - because it allows the discarding of any interpretations) that the moment of turning into an animal is a lie created by the Government and the management of the Hotel. What could actually happen is that just those who fail to find a mate are killed and "replaced" with a real animal. This is a more realistic view of the film (and turns it into a horror or thriller), but that should not be dismissed lightly - in the first film by director Yorgos Lantimos, Dogtooth, the lie by which they are washed brains is a major motive. Our emotional intelligence is a matter of upbringing, not a given. One can live a lifetime of deceit and never know the truth. Worse - one can learn to lie to himself to make life simpler. This is exactly what the Hotel Heroes do - they exclude the option of living alone. For them, the only right way is to find someone who is the same as you and to live with him peacefully and quietly (if you are not comfortable, he is "counting" your children). The loneliness - in their desire to be radically different from the people in the hotel - is being pushed to the other end of the vicious circle. Their rebellion is so much a desire for escape from the status quo that their lives are not realized in anything more than the old horrible melody, sang in a new voice. Maybe it sounds like the electronic music they dance on their own.
The poster of the film defines it as a love story. In my opinion, however, love is present only as a social concept, not as a real rescue. In the woods, David meets the heroine of Rachel Weiss. She, like him, is short-sighted. This time he does not even have to lie - they are really compatible! For the first time since the beginning of the movie, there is something real happening - he wants to take care of her, hunts her rabbits, they both dance and build all of their own language with which they communicate without the Leader of the Loneliness (the wonderful Lea Seydou) to uncover their relationship . But no lie is left untold in the Lobster. The moral lesson that whatever you do, you have to bear the consequences determined by the societies is the crushing reality in which the film works. The leader understands their relationship and leads Weiss's heroine in the city, where instead of correcting her sight, she blinds her. The question she asks when she realizes she's blind is the other most important replica in the movie, "Why did you blind me, not him?" And it seems as if everything is shattering - if we have believed that we are witnessing true love, - because no real love should be so self-evidently selfish.
For you "The lobster" might not be so serious and crushing, of course. He is really very original and fresh in his humor. It combines great polar emotions. As ancient Greek drama has commanded - we laugh at heroes we find inferior to us, and we cry when we see ourselves or better than us, devastated by fate. In the case of the particular movie, the characters are a frightening warning about what we are not yet, but we would have to get up. It is through this definition of the characters - as though we are, but still emotionally infantile - the film resonates perfectly with both laughter and sadness.Loneliness is probably the deepest theme of "The Lobster", which remains as a sludge, after everything else is sifted. The end does not give the firm answer whether David dares to blind himself so that they are both compatible. In my opinion, he avoids himself - I decide to believe and hope for it, because escaping would mean to question all the absurd norms in which they have made him believe for years. To escape means he's finally afraid of lying more than fear of loneliness. Which in itself makes him the first one to really rebel in this movie - against any norm. He allowed himself to fall in love, but he also let himself be disappointed with love. Why should you be the same as the person you love to love? And do you love real or all is manipulation? Of course David's choice of escape does not mean he will be happy. But happiness, just like love, is portrayed as a curved mirror - never your image in it is what you had hoped for. I think this is a realistic and sobering concept in the context of all the formulas society claims to have for happiness or full life. As you say "Fight Club" - you are neither your business nor the car you drive. The lobster goes further: you are not the man you think you love.
Yet this is not a love or non-love film. Although he spends the story through the "search and discovery" of love, his power is not there. Love is just an example of emotion that societies turn to vulgarity. The pathological madness of every society is a reason to be constantly criticized. Every society must be considered inadequate until proven otherwise. Because hell is definitely the others and you have to be very alert if you want to get out of their trap. And no one is alert while he is blind.