Lobster, the true meaning of the movie with Colin Farrell

Lobster a movie that airs today at 21.15 on Sky. Released in 2015, Lobster it is the director’s first English-language film. Yorgos Lanthimos, a director who makes the grotesque and surreal his hallmark, as happened recentlyDarling.

lobster, plot

David (Colin Farrell) is an architect whose wife leaves after more than eleven years of marriage. Sad event, but what’s the reality Lobster becomes tragic. In fact, we are in a dystopian reality, in a future in which the only existence allowed by society is the existence of a couple and single people who need to be “cured” or “transformed”. Like all other people who don’t have a partner, David is sent to a hotel where he has forty-five days to find a soul mate or transform into an animal of his choice. David chooses a lobster as the animal of his next life, but during a hotel stay with his new friends (Ben Whishaw AND John S. Reilly), I will try to follow the advice of the director (Olivia Colman) find a new love and thus be able to continue living as a person. However, things soon get out of hand for David, who decides to run away from the hotel and join the Loners, a group led by a woman (Leah Seydoux), who explains to him that romantic relationships are forbidden in their group. And it is here, paradoxically, that David meets the woman he falls in love with (Rachel Weisz).

Movie Explanation

Yorgos Lanthimos he has always been a filmmaker who inserts social reflections into his films, using many unsettling elements. Its distinctive brand is essentially about taking something familiar and, above all, universal and wrapping it in elements that refer to the unknown, to the other. By taking reality and turning it into a darker and more disturbing version, Lanthimos often has the viewer deal with a creeping sense of dread and unease, dealing with a constant feeling of “heaviness” as he watches the scrolling images on the screen. From this point of view Lobster

it doesn’t matter: thanks to very cold photography and chromatic choices that seem to favor grays and desaturated colors, the Colin Farrell film is based on one of the most versatile elements in the world: Love. In the first half of the film, Lanthimos appears to be interested in using his protagonist as a puppet whose usefulness is to reveal the true nature of love, a powerful feeling that society has used in a construct that no longer makes sense. IN Lobster married life is no longer a choice between two people in love, but a real social Convention, equipped with rules to follow, certificates to show everyone what is bureaucratic and artificial rather than emotional and spontaneous. And the viewer, in this first half of the film, somehow finds himself reflecting on today’s society, which, albeit in less frightening tones, seems to be moving in the same direction. A world i.e. where the “lonely” person is seen as a piece of the puzzle, still waiting, a loner who just needs to wait to meet their “special person”, implying that the only way to be complete and make sense is to put yourself in a pair. and then to the family.

However, upon reaching this point, Lanthimos suddenly changes his reflection. In an unexpected twist, it transports its protagonist to a group of Loners: people who have fled society, rejected its strict rules to live in freedom, and then find themselves entangled in another kind of captivity. Because if only a couple is important in society, then in Alone they representopposition, a couple is the only thing that doesn’t make sense. Lanthimos then sums up the paradox and contradiction of the two worlds under a magnifying glass, emphasizing that extremism is by its very nature bankrupt, because somehow one faction falls into the same mistakes as the other faction. Thus, the majority and the opposition become two faces of the same currency, aiming at supremacy and curbing what by its very nature should be free. And it is no coincidence that David falls in love when he is among the Loners. Although throughout the film the character Colin Farrell

seems calm, at times submissive, in fact it is the most revolutionary element of the story. If, while in a hotel, he runs away from social conventions – even after trying to obey the rules – and refuses the idea of ​​\u200b\u200bbeing with someone violently, being content with what he finds when he is in Solitaire, she similarly turns away from stupid rules based on on prejudice, and eventually finds love.

And again, Lanthimos brings the viewer to some point, and then throws him onto another road that has not yet been traveled. When David and the Myopic Woman seem to have found their happy ending, something unexpected happens – and be careful, because from now on spoilers at the end of the movie. Those who are guilty of violating the rules dictated by him, lovers are punished. In reality, the Myopic Woman is blinded by the leader of the group with a brutality that seems to suggest that in this world where everyone is chasing or running from love, love simply doesn’t exist anymore. Realizing that his lover can no longer see, and realizing that the Myopic Woman no longer wants to be with him because the differences between them have opened up like the proverbial abyss, David reverts to his beliefs stemming from a sort of collective plagiarism. Love in his world is not closeness of emotions or spirit, but rather physical closeness. For this reason, at the end of the film, David locks himself in the bathroom with a meat knife in his hands. In front of a mirror, with scotch tape in his mouth, a man tries to gouge out his own eyes and blind himself, while the Myopic Woman waits for him in the diner. However, the screen fades to black before the viewer is allowed to know the outcome of David’s actions. She had seen him hesitate a moment before, but she does not know whether the man was finally convinced of the terrible injury or not. The film ends like this, with an open ending. And with that unanswered question in mind, Lanthimos allows his audience to choose the meaning of his film. David’s hesitation, his inability to make up his mind, may mean that he doesn’t love the Myopic Woman that much. In the same way, however, the fact that he blinds himself still represents a kind of bad luck, because it causes David to fall back into the bonds of social beliefs that make no logical sense, but are equal to the dictates of some dictator. Blinding himself just to physically look like the woman he’s in love with is not love, but that obsession that Lanthimos has been manipulatively and clandestinely described throughout the film. In the third reading, there is also the opportunity to see his victory in David’s doubts: although he was ready to blind himself, as society seems to require him, the man understands that love is something else, and stops before gouging out his eyes. He loves the Myopic Woman so much that for the first time he feels free to assert himself, to be who he is, without having to change to look like someone else. And this will be his third revolutionary act, because he again avoids the rules, this time set by his own morality. Be careful, however, because this third theory does not push for a happy ending

. If David asserts himself and stays the way he is, returning to the Myopic Woman would still mean her loss, because she made it clear that the only way they could be equal was by being equal. Thus, David’s fate remains shrouded in mystery, but Lanthimos seems to suggest that in the modern world, love remains both a utopia and a lie.