“The Lobster” conceptual satire and scathing – Télérama.fr

After education in “Canine” and mourning in “Alps” is the couple and promises of happiness Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos through looks in his third film with luxurious cast. One oddity that hits at least at first.

Starting point shock: in a society like ours celibacy is no longer tolerated, and does not find a partner inexorably transformed … into the animal of choice. They are like that, films from Greek Lanthimos: highly conceptual, on the edge of the fantastic and, at their best, delightfully absurd. They revisit in a skewed angle, unexpected, a great “social issue” education in Canine, where a father his children completely isolated from the outside world, raising them in isolation; mourning Alps, where members of a secret society proposed to replace with their relatives recently deceased …

Here, then, love. Or, at least, the couple. Left by his wife, the hero (Colin Farrell, fleshy, who plays very well the type a little slow) is brought in a nice hotel, a very house arrest where he is forty-five days to find among residents, a new companion – he checked on reaching the “heterosexual” box. He leaves behind his brother, since the latter, having failed the test, is now a dog. And if the film is called The Lobster, is that his hero has chosen, if that fails, to reincarnate in lobster animals to exceptional longevity: over a century …

In this world, a lot of weird rules add to the bizarre rules: thus, we can win extra days – a period before processing – participating in the capture of ” lonely “, those who have renounced love and clandestinely live in the woods. The discovery of this crazy maze of regulation is the first part of the film a dark and cruel comedy, often irresistible. Because the lives of two also has its codes. It is absolutely necessary to have something in common, a trait or physical characteristic, with the person chosen (e) to form a pair

Everything allowed to escape forced animal metamorphosis chronic nosebleeds pretend to seduce this girl bleeding from the nose all the time, or hide her feelings to please the woman of ice, a monster without heart … These strategies are so small tasty as the film runs out of steam when the story moves from the ‘Solitaires’ side, strong led by Lea Seydoux, who plays in the savage chieftain no less authoritarian methods as those of his opponents. For symmetry is almost perfect: in the woods, we are ready to punish those who love as hard as we torture single side of the law …

Lanthimos gives no key. Although her first English movie we see, at the luxurious cast, is a satire injunctions to happiness and life together, dished out ad nauseam by the pub and other dominant images. It is a closed system: a machine to produce free and cerebral fiction, a fable acid on the barriers that man constantly puts his own happiness

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