The Melbourne International Film Festival, Reviewed
The best, the worst, and the weirdest of what's coming to Australian movie screens in coming months.
The Film That Will Make You Love Colin Farrell Again:
The Lobster, dir. Yorgos Lanthimos
Starring: Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Ben Whishaw, Léa Seydoux, John C. Reilly
Reviewed by: Harry Windsor
Colin Farrell is a case study in the importance of confidence for an actor. A great boxer is never quite the same after he’s been knocked out, and Farrell had the cruelest of haymakers. So assured in early films like Tigerland and Minority Report, which seemed to anoint him Tom Cruise’s (more lascivious) heir apparent, he’s never seemed at ease as a leading man since the Blonde Wig Disaster of 2004 — Oliver Stone’s Alexander.
Farrell’s reserve in films like Miami Vice seemed less like cool stoicism and more like timidity. Most would cite In Bruges as the beginning of the ship turning, though it hardly led to a spate of interesting films. Fright Night, Saving Mr. Banks, The Way Back and Ondine; a series of films for distinctive directors who still couldn’t bring out anything interesting in the Irish rogue whose rascally days seemed long behind him.
That it’s Yorgos Lanthimos who’s finally done so feels bizarrely fitting. In his new film The Lobster, Lanthimos has cast Farrell as a man in a funk, and he proves a natural fit for the director’s affectless surrealism. Farrell has stacked on the pounds Hollywood-style: the body is swollen rather than convincingly fleshy, but the extra kilos do wonders for the actor’s face: all jowly and oddly endearing.
Farrell’s character arrives at a leafy, well-manicured retreat for the loveless where singles must either couple up or be turned into an animal of their choice at the end of their stay. Checking out never seemed so final, but the alternative is hardly rosy either. Successful coupledom in this world seems less to do with affection than it does a shared weakness: shortsightedness, or nosebleeds, or a relish for cruelty.
In 2009, the director’s Dogtooth imagined a fictional world confined to one household, but The Lobster conceives an entire alternate society. The parameters of that society only come into view in the film’s second half, when Farrell flees his looming transmogrification and joins a ragtag bunch known as “the loners” living in the woods; a collective is barely less restrictive than the hotel from which they’ve all fled. Their leader, the inestimable Léa Seydoux, vigilantly and sometimes violently enforces one ironclad rule: no couples.
Lanthimos has a gift for making imagined social conventions plausible and even logical, and in doing so he exposes — in often brutal, mordantly funny fashion — the arbitrariness of our own. In The Lobster, relationships might be self-harming but they’re also essentially narcissistic. Which impulse eventually wins out on Planet Lanthimos should be no surprise, and the film’s final scene is as bracing as it is (darkly) comic.
For fans of: post-True Detective Colin Farrell, life inside a Salvador Dali painting, deadpan yucks
Opens in Australia: October 22