The premise of The Lobster might sound like quirky fun: if you remain single for 45 days, you will be turned into an animal. But the movie is much more than its initial premise, creating an entire dystopic world with a disconcerting, but intermittently hilarious, tone. Colin Farrell plays the hapless hero, David, who is dumped by his wife in the opening of the movie. He moves to a Hotel (their capitalization, not mine) where he must find his mate. The policies of the Hotel dictate a nightmarish courtship ritual with a retro-kitsch aesthetic. Couples are cajoled into awkwardly asking each other for dances as the hotel directors sing covers of sappy love songs, complete with sway-stepping choreography. You laugh a bit, but the movie isn’t a romp. Aggressive string quartets dominate the soundtrack and unflinching violence punctuates the affectless social order.The premise sometimes yields to funny one-liners: if you encounter unresolvable problems with your chosen mate, you’ll be assigned a child – that usually helps. Hardy har.
But once David escapes the hotel to the alternate society, the necessary band of outsiders that always seem to flesh out dystopic scenarios, you see that there is more going on here than an easy fable that ribs our modern obsession with monogamy. The unfree and the free aren’t straight-forward opposites. The unfree – those required to find a mate – are forced into relationships premised on dishonesty and a mutual fear of loneliness, but the free are forbidden from coupling. Gone are the prom-meets-cruise-ship couples mixers; here they have silent raves in the forest. The leader (Léa Seydoux) is a soft-spoken sociopath, whose feline eyes track the burgeoning flirtations among her followers, and visits dastardly punishment for their indiscretions. It’s a scenario that sees through to the underside of social protest: the dissenters are equally shackled to their opposition.
As the other favorite dystopian theme – the lovers in a society that forbids love — begins to emerge between David and Rachel Weisz’s unnamed character, the real question of freedom is fleshed out. Social control is social control, be it of the old world quality or the new, but where love is concerned, freedom and control are hopelessly tangled. The external conflict between the warring bands is something of a macrocosm for love: a constant negotiation of both the fear of attachment, and the inexorable need to couple. The resolution folds inward and comments on the personal, not the social question. It is a meditation on the moment before the plunge, of love as the ultimate expression of freedom and total captivity — love as an insanity teetering on a razor’s edge between the two.
