domino harvey wrote:It's safe for the Manson Family maybe, but otherwise no. Graphic language, sexual content, and disturbing violence abound
Yes, the characters do a few acts that you wouldn't want to copy, even if they only happened in front of the family dog!
Major spoilers:
I liked this a lot and it felt to me like a strange combination of 1984, Fahrenheit 451 and Godard's Weekend. I also understand the comments about the "flat affect" to Weisz's voiceover, especially in the early sections. There's a terse, dispassionate (though quite funny! I kind of thought of it as the most perfunctory type of those audio description DVD tracks that you could imagine, with the flat stating of events immediately occurring on screen, or talking over dialogue with the same dialogue!) way of speaking there that initially feels as cold as the early Hotel section, though I think the key thing here is that when we see Weisz's character in the flesh she has a more nuanced character, despite having to keep up a 1984-style conformity to the society.
Plus there's the way that the whole voiceover is eventually revealed to be an incriminating diary having its contents read out, something which seems to only strengthen the 1984 parallels.
I particularly liked that the film isn't about privileging one group over the other. This isn't about celebrating single people over couples, or vice versa. This is much more a critique of individuals being imposed upon and controlled by an intrusive society, and swapping sides isn't going to suddenly solve the core problem of the individual being trampled over for the wider good (its really a political allegory in that sense as well).
Individuals are given routines and tasks to perform until they run out their time or otherwise get captured, and in a sense they're already treated like animals. Its just that as human beings they're still a guest to be attended to, or a squad to be marshalled, whereas the animals are just a resource to be utilised without consideration. One of the best aspects of the film is that opening scene of the pony going over to its crippled companion (which is kind of paralleled in the magnificent final shot - see especially the way that it cuts out just as a couple of trucks in the background are about to meet, and pass), or the way that the whole animal transformation metaphor falls away once away from the Hotel, but the characters are suddenly surrounded by watchful animals throughout. They might not have a family connection any more, but every rabbit skinned suddenly could have once been a human being, and the fact that both sides use animals is another thing that suggests a shared callousness.
I was amused by the darkly comic Hotel section, and especially liked the way that all of the little group tasks take the form of unloving, pragmatic approaches to partnership! Its pair bonding through biological necessity (or maybe not, since children also appear to be focus group tested and paired with potential parents! It makes you wonder whether orphaned children also have a clock immediately start counting down from the death of their parents to some horrible fate! No wonder that child is so quick to helpfully suggest killing any intruder with a handy carving knife!) or for wider societal convenience than for the good of the individuals involved. You need a partner not to offer you love and companionship, but to be there for the sole purpose of performing the Heimlich manoeuvre when you choke at the dinner table! Or to act as a deterrent to rapists (i.e.
all other men, who will immediately pounce on an unattended woman, but will have their inevitable urges held in check by a male escort!)!
And I liked the way that the hunt for loners kind of takes the form of a forced employee paintball weekend!
The big problem with this system is of course that practical, pragmatic matches are only fine in a world in which people have no particularly strong emotions either way about a partner! This is a world where you have to prove you are a good match, if only in the most superficial dating website way of both sharing a love of regular nosebleeds, yet you are expected to be able to move on immediately upon the end of a relationship (either a break up or a death), by immediately getting arrested and moved into dating detention centres! We see throughout the film the supporting characters getting betrayed by friends (an unacceptable pair bonding) or yearning but going unloved, all getting taken off to face their fates. And of course those who play the game too well are kind of the ultimate monsters, as they have somehow managed to make the system work for them to allow them to remain single seemingly forever! (I kind of see the "Heartless woman" here as similar to the girl played by Chiaki Kuriyama in Battle Royale who actually finds that she has an aptitude for the game and can callously dispatch her fellow classmates, because those are the newly legitimised rules which have 'self-actualised' her!)
But its not much better once with the group of loners in the woods, where it is all about punishing members for anything more than transactional contacts. In its extreme oppositional stance to the dominant monstrous society, the resistance group has become just as inhuman. Inevitably societal control is most apparent over people's sexual selves. That's the risky thing that needs to be kept under a tight leash until allowed circumscribed expression in limited, 'acceptable' ways. The paired dance scenes are key here, with the couple's dance (all dressed in identical tuxedos and flower-patterned dresses) to a Gene Pitney ballad contrasted against the loners dancing collectively but individually to their CD players, with no music leaking out! (Though I like to imagine that
they're all dancing on their own to Robyn!. I kind of feel that the
entire Body Talk album by Robyn could tell the story of this film!)
It's also kind of like the ending of Fahrenheit 451, except instead of becoming a repository of knowledge available to anyone who will listen, the characters here end up isolating themselves performing wild sign language-style dance movements that are only meaningful in the context of music that we never hear! Eventually the main couple even create their own language to be able to communicate together privately.
I’m not too sure that the film gets too explicitly into jealousies outside or inside relationships destroying them, although I think that it is one of the big implied themes swirling around the characters. How are people driven by their own repressed desires in their actions that repress others?
Though I also liked the way that the raid on the Hotel kind of takes the form of a blunt friend cruelly uttering home truths in order to mess up a 'happy' relationship! (“You know she never liked jazz and only learnt to play the saxophone to please you?” kind of stuff!) It is forcibly putting doubts in the heads of the smug-seeming couples and showing them how much of a sham it is. But does that really work in a pragmatic relationship where both parties kind of know about the nosebleed situation and that the ten year old daughter that suddenly turned up might not be their own? Presumably at least some of the couples have come to terms with the loveless façade and will make it work, if just out of the mutual urge for self-preservation! (And a pragmatic form of love perhaps helps to move more quickly and easily without much fuss onto another partner should something happen) But if that is the case, what is the point of the resistance breaking in and forcing them to acknowledge home truths that they already know in their hearts? Isn’t it essentially pointless and presumptuous to assume that all people need is to simply be woken up to their oppression and forced to see the truth of their situation, assuming that this is all that is needed - that people are not aware of the systems they are trapped inside and have never thought about these issues and struggled with them before submitting to the lesser of two evils, and agreeing to play the dominant society's game (for as long as they can) for a quiet life?
There's a strong sense of Godard's Weekend here in the way that Godard's film also has that split in it, starting with the mercenarily cold capitalist couple and ending with the polemic spouting cannibal radicals ("I'm sure there's some of your husband in there too" being one of the final lines to the wife, barely causing her to pause in chewing, except to compliment the chef). I wonder if this could partly be a reason for the relationship between the French au pair and resistance leader turning up in The Lobster?
I think the second half of the film is magnificent, though it needs the more mannered, claustrophobic, darkly comic hotel section to contrast against. I love the way that the visits to the city allow the main couple to 'safely play' at being a loving couple. (I really like the way that trying to force love to happen in the hotel section twists into a couple having the rare opportunity to touch each other under the guise of a 'sham' relationship!) Suddenly now that they're actually a legitimate couple, the otherwise cruel City isn't so bad! The wider society has aligned with your own feelings and suddenly there is a new life possible where there was no future before, but the characters shouldn't be deluded into thinking that society has altruistically worked in their interests, more that a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day! (And of course its also ignoring the callous cruelty at the heart of a system that currently isn't treating you badly personally)
And I love that we get some scenes of being overjoyed by all of the modern conveniences on the shelves that aren't available whilst hiding out in the woods! Seductive but soulless consumer products against brutally ascetic, yet close to nature, austerity. Either way the individual is losing some part of themselves, or at least some of their options, in being forced to make a binary choice into signing up for one mode of living or the other!
Can you quantify love? Force it when it is not there? Force it not to be there when it is? Who is benefiting from the repression? And who is just fooling themselves? Does it just come down to what you can personally live with?
But even better than both of these sections is that the film even pushes through this either/or contrast to the truly important thing - the main relationship itself. I love that moment where Weisz's character answers 'wrongly' to Farrell, laying herself bare and open to rejection from him for not being a 'perfect' partner. It contrasts against Farrell trying to please the "Heartless woman" earlier, which ends in tragedy, but here Weisz's character is accepted. Although the film pushes even beyond that to the dreadfully uncomfortable scene of Farrell's potential self-blinding to 'match' (or convert?) for his partner. Has he still not learnt his lesson about trying to please a loved one even when it will hurt him? Has Weisz's character pushed him into it, or is just passively accepting his choice? Is the final, most horrible form of coercion nothing to do with wider societal forces pushing the individual around but the sacrifices between two people in a private relationship, each reigning the other one in, or egging them on? Perhaps that's the deepest cut of all.
(In a silly, but amusing and I feel apt, aside I was casually told by a (married, with children) work colleague in passing a couple of months back out of the blue that "You should have children". Presumably its because I'm dangerously single myself! But its difficult to know what to say in that kind of situation, except to thank the person for their kind offer but graciously decline their proposal!)
EDIT (27th May): While the whole cast is full of familiar comic faces, I've been wracking my brain for the last couple of days trying to figure out where I knew the loner leader's male companion from, and eventually a trip to imdb reminded me: Michael Smiley played
Tyres in Spaced!
