Some late thoughts on The Lobster

2015
Writers: Efthimis Filippou, Yorgos Lanthimos
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

There probably isn’t a premise more distinct and downright bonkers than Yorgos Lanthimos’s sci-fi romantic black comedy drama The Lobster. Set in the near future in a society in which the law orders everyone to be in a couple, it follows newly-single Colin Farrell as he gets taken to a special hotel to meet a new partner. The clincher being, he has only 45 days before his time runs out and he gets turned into an animal.

The other inhabitants of the hotel are equally confused and desperate, relegated to nothing more than their ‘distinct features’ in the completely functional attempts to pair up. There’s John C Reilly’s Lisping Man, Ben Whishaw’s Limping Man, Ashely Jensen’s Biscuit Woman and Jessica Barden’s Nosebleed Woman. On top of that, the inhabitants are sent into the forest each day to hunt with tranquilisers the renegade loners who camp there, those who defy to be single.

Such a set up is so unusual and approached so clinically that it’s hard to take this film seriously as a piece of drama. Instead, you’re invited to engage with this world from a distance, to marvel at the eccentricity of its constituent parts and appreciate the sheer mundanity of its greyish cinematography and perfectly parallel, even logical framing and camera shots. I was expecting some sort of reasoning behind the government policy, maybe it being a means of managing underpopulation or dictatorial dominance. But like Lanthimos’s previous films Dogtooth and Alps, this film completely omits any sort of explanatory context.

This isn’t meant as a critique. Like his previous films, The Lobster showcases Lanthimos’s distinct love of world-building and creating unique and thought-promoting scenarios, such as the rigid structuring of the hotel. Every aspect and set-up is thought-through for maximum impact – the way the residents eat meals at rows of single tables, the ridiculously literal presentations they are given on the benefits of coupledom (woman walks alone; woman walks with man), the callous methods and punishments for testing the residents’ sexual functionality. In all, it makes an engrossing and surprisingly satisfying watch, one where I couldn’t help wanting to see what could possibly come next. Thankfully, the tone is so knowingly ludicrous that the film ends up being a lot funnier than I was expecting (or at least the trailer led me to expect).

The whole scenario perfectly suits the director’s love of arch, precise and literal dialogue. The cleverness of the dating context helps create a quiet sense of desperation, and provides one of the film’s many, almost cluttered, themes on the absurdity of dating and the social etiquettes and behaviours involved. Overall, like his previous work, the greatest sense one gets of watching this is that you’re asked to study this world as if through a microscope. Rachel Weisz’s forceful narration describes scenes in the minutest of detail and the camera maintains an incredibly still distance, asking us to consider these sad little characters as they are in their laboratory-like Perspex cage. The film is often quite cruel in its mockery of the protagonists, and encourages us, with our outsider status, to share in laughing at the ridiculousness of the scenarios and how unerringly stupid the characters are for taking part in it, from watching Ben Whishaw willingly and repeatedly smash his face into a table to gazing at John C Reilly tumble down a hill in slow-motion. It’s gleefully enjoyable, in a way that almost made me feel a little guilty for taking such pleasure in such preposterous meanness.

Thinking about it afterwards, The Lobster seems to me overall to be a critique of fundamentalism, and the foundation that one can understand or control something by looking at it literally, like the hotel’s unfounded notion that happy couples can be made from a single shared defining characteristic. Similarly, I couldn’t help thinking about how the media and governments like to define people into broad, often reductive, categories which hardly ever get to the root of understanding people and why they do what they do.

The Lobster loses its way once the film leaves the hotel and moves into the forest. It’s too long – a good 15-20 minutes or so could probably be shaved from the exploration of the forest-dwellers’ strange routines and instead be used to focus more on the basics of the story. In the end though, I was a big big fan of this movie, and can heartedly say I don’t think I’ve ever really seen anything like it, which is always a plus in my view. At the very least, it had my friends and me debating long afterwards, though mostly about which animals we’d like to be turned into.

Going All In: Spectre and the Legacy of Bond

2015
Writers: John Logan, Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, Jez Butterworth
Director: Sam Mendes

Other than perhaps the upcoming Star Wars sequel, the heady dread of anticipation hasn’t been higher this year than it has been for Bond 24, Spectre. Frankly, with the return of both Daniel Craig and director Sam Mendes, as well screenwriters John Logan, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (plus Jez Butterworth this time), music by Thomas Newman and cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema (Interstellar; Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), it would be tragic if the film didn’t turn out good. Thankfully, it’s emerged pretty darn great, maybe not as accomplished as Skyfall, but still oodles of fun and a hella good action film.

Whilst Skyfall was a more character-driven, intimate (as much as Bond can be) revenge movie, Spectre is a massive, flamboyant and actually quite playful romp much more in line with films of Bond past. Mendes kicks off this lush stylish film with a super-scaled pre-credits sequence set in Mexico City on Day of the Dead, complete with giant skull parades and a cast of thousands. Surely the sign of a director in complete confidence and control of his material, the scene opens with a very impressive nearly 5 minute long take, coolly gliding through a carnival, up a lift several floors, out a window and across rooftops. Then what follows is probably the biggest opening sequence yet, complete with exploding buildings and a loop-the-looping helicopter, very much in the vein of the noisy vehicle stunts and close calls of the Pierce Brosnan era. It’s hugely enjoyable, and can’t help leave you wondering how the hell they’ll top it.

Bond’s antics in Mexico cause tension with new M (Ralph Fiennes), who dismisses Bond off active duty. M is under pressure from a competing new government security agency, the Joint Intelligence Service, led by slimy bureaucrat C (Andrew Scott), which is threatening the existence of the Double-O program. Working off a hunch, Bond ignores orders and embarks on his own investigations, which leads him on a direct path with the shady organisation SPECTRE.

What struck me most watching this is, after the more self-contained and self-conscious 21^st century films, Spectre is the first Craig film to really embrace what I consider to be the classic Bond film formula. Skyfall had plenty of neat little nods to Bond’s past antics, but Spectre is the film that really is identifiably Bond in character. There’s the luxurious globetrotting (including desert, ultramodern mountaintop clinic and an especially sumptuous-looking Rome); the return of the super-secret giant lair; the unspeaking henchman (Dave Bautista); quippy one-liners and nods-to-the-audience humour; increasingly outlandish stunts (example: a skiing wingless plane); and one of my personal favourites – the fight on the train. The film even opens with the iconic gunbarrel sequence, much to my delight.

These throwbacks to the past in my view, whilst mostly welcome, don’t always sit too comfortably with the more austere tone set by the last three films. The big car chase is intercut with several jokes which I couldn’t help finding distracting, and Craig’s performance, previously tense and somewhat tormented, is given less space to explore Bond’s failings, instead presenting him more as a determined soldier who is at times almost quite arch when he speaks lines. The inclusion of these more classic features is likely down to problems with the script, which clunkily struggles to link the various location-changes of Bond’s mystery solving beyond tenuous links and action setups to fill time. This is the longest Bond film yet, and there are times when it does feel it, despite the breathless nature of other scenes.

I did feel we get more glimpses of some of Bond’s other flaws, such as his alcoholism and at times his dismissive attitude to women. I’m not sure how I felt about Bond’s romance with Dr. Madeleine Swann, played perfectly by Lea Seydoux. It did seem a little more forced, especially when you think about how naturally it seemed to occur with Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale. But that’s not to dismiss Dr. Swann, who is an excellent engaging character who can hold her own against Bond and the villains, and who, unlike some previous Bond girls, is believable as an intelligent professional woman (I’m looking at you Dr. Christmas Jones).

On the other hand, I felt Monica Belluci was entirely wasted as Lucia Sciarra. Much was touted about her age, and her proclaiming herself as a “Bond woman” rather than girl, but we get practically no glimpses of this – she appears for probably no more than five minutes and is nothing more than a foil for Bond to pump information from. It’s somewhat similar to Teri Hatcher’s Paris Carver in Tomorrow Never Dies, but at least in that film her character had some personal resonance for both Bond and Jonathan Pryce’s villain.

On a better note, we get more from the dream team of M, Q (Ben Whishaw), Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) and Tanner (Rory Kinnear) – fine actors all, and standouts thanks to bigger roles and the chance to share some of the action with James. Most importantly, Christoph Waltz is fantastic as Franz Obenhauser, the head of SPECTRE, imbuing him with a genuine menace few previous villains ever could muster. His welcome decision to downplay theatrics with only the odd touch of camp helps make him a convincing counterpart to our hero.

What did leave me a little disappointed was the film’s approach to SPECTRE itself. What made the best villains of the more recent films work so well is that they speak to our modern fears of the unknown enemy. Danger now can come not from any known foreign government, but by any number of sources, from terrorist organisations to cybercriminals. At one point, M and C talk about the interplay of shadows and light, and about how many of the threats and much of the work to combat it remains in the shadows. SPECTRE could play into this perfectly, and we do indeed get glimpses into their work, mostly via news footage of disasters and reports during a shadowy Masonic meeting (probably my favourite scene in the film). Yet in time, SPECTRE’s reasoning for their current plot are overwhelmed by the personal vendetta of Obenhauser himself, which leads him to come across as extremely petty and diminishes the threat of SPECTRE’s plan. Attempts to link Bond’s past with SPECTRE are strained at best, and the very final setpiece of the film is underwhelming, simply because it favours the more personal battle between Bond and Obenhauser over the threat of SPECTRE.

What did strike me is how the goal of the villain has changed over time. As others have pointed out, this is the first post-Snowden Bond film. Whilst previous villains were seeking money (Thunderball, Goldfinger, Goldeneye), political chaos and war (The Spy Who Loved Me, You Only Live Twice, Tomorrow Never Dies) or simply global destruction (Moonraker), SPECTRE is now interested in data and information, represented within the film through the power of surveillance. It’s surprising how much a film this big takes a more liberal opposition to the notion of a super NSA-style program, This ties into the film’s multiple links with the past in valuing men on the ground, ones who can look the enemy in the eye and pull the trigger, over the potential of warfare from afar. This is perhaps one added reason why gadgets remain minimal, firstly because they don’t possess the exoticism they once did, and second because they can’t always provide the safety and support we expect from them.

Despite how critical this piece has sounded, I think I liked this film much more than a lot of people did. It unusually seems to have been better received by more critics than with a lot of the public. It’s definitely one of those movies where to enjoy it is to not think too much about it and simply savour the spectacle. It’s hardly the best Bond – both Casino Royale and Skyfall were much more successful films – but I’d say it looks set to be one of the better Bonds. I’m looking forward to watching it again.