The Lobster Review

The Lobster Film Review.

I’m single. I have been since before the pandemic. Don’t get me wrong, as single status goes in the orchestra of tragedy, straight heterosexual and cisgenic man is undoubtedly the smallest Violin. There are a few extra strings for being second-generation Asian. My father was born and raised in a culture and country that sees Jane Austin as an instruction manual and extreme suffragette propaganda. Thankfully my brother has given him grandchildren, so the most I concern myself with are sudden bouts of how I could look after myself, and as I type this, I suspect he is catfishing on shaadi.com with my face. As for myself, the two main issues I have with single life are having bursitis in my left shoulder and my libido, both of which I can treat by using attachments rather than creating them.

The lobster does not have that luxury, though. Under Thai society, he has been divorced and has 45 days to find love or become…a Lobster. It’s a film that deals with the social and economic constraints of singledom through allegory, and the compulsion to fit into the life of couples is particularly harsh in the time since it was made. David is given the choice of heterosexual or homosexual. Still, bi-sexuality is dismissed by the authorities almost immediately and regrettably is never touched upon again throughout the film, albeit with a certain sapphic tension in the woods.

The film breaks down into three sections; the first is by far the strongest. The Hotel is one with rituals and anxieties all around. The etiquette of mingle dances and a certain frisson as the solitary folk bond in some ways, and desperately cloy to any similarities with a possible partner in a way I have not felt since I walked through freshers week saying “What ‘A’Levels’ did you do while starring at tattoos and earrings.

Colin Farrel portrays a real find in David. In many ways a peer of Tom Hiddleston in High Rise. The divorce seems quite natural as it soon becomes apparent how self-serving he is, yet fragile—and muted in his speech. Frankly, his vulnerability is more in being ineffectual than in any honesty. It drives a lot of the humour of the burnt hands of masturbation and robotic lap dances he enjo…I mean, he endures..terribly.

As he represses himself to survive and finds the futility in attempting to live a lie, losing both man’s best friend and his brother in one swoop. He finds himself in the camps of single life and realises it is a jungle out there. He is cnn enough to know that autonomous ethos has its limitations but attaches quite quickly to the leaders and seniors in this camp. To show any affection is torture, and betraying them seems just as harsh as compliance with the city’s rules.

Sadly this is where the film takes a real nosedive. The script seems more infatuated with creating cheaper and cheaper allegories for relationships, so the double entendres just become bilious jabs with a sense of thuddery. It could have been a League of gentleman group ‘Legs Akimbo’ production. The attack on the hotel does nothing in the narrative, and the descent into the city shows us little more. A few snappy one-liners ending with the notion that love is blind marries the story. And at this point, the muted meet cute of small talk on nose bleeds and short-sightedness has become a dull mundanity less Wes Anderson but more risky Gervaise doing that dance.

Again.

It’s not without merit, but like many relationships, it outstays its welcome and should read the signs sooner. 

A Sunday curio that dated a lot in these non-binary times. And not gracefully