The first time I saw The Lobster, (still one of the best films of the year if you’re keeping track), the craft of filmmaking and the way that it’s director, Yorgos Lanthimos, created expectation and then shot that in the foot on camera multiple times stuck out to me. This is a film about deflation and the way that relationships are not just built on a few things, but many. Something that I noticed as well during the film was the fact that it seemed cold, and empty, but not in a bad way. There seemed a great craft in this. How though could cold and empty be of good craft? Aren’t movies in fact supposed to provide entertainment through catharsis? They do,The Lobster is just entertaining in an odd way.
The second time I saw The Lobster, I had the great opportunity to see where this entertainment came from, and how such an odd film aesthetically, isn’t really odd at all, but actually quite familiar to the thematic blood that one finds in one of the greatest novels of all time: Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. What an odd comparison, but the same craft that Gustave Flaubert contributed to his classic novel of contrasting realism and Romanticism, is used by the screenwriters Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou to build their story of love and violence in The Lobster. But on that note we need to dig a little bit deeper, and while it’s not the deepest similarity we need to look at characters and the way they interpret the world. The world of The Lobster requires that all people must have a partner, or they will be sent to a hotel where they stay for 45 days. At the end of these days if a partner has not been found, the person in question will be turned into an animal of their choice and released into the wild. David, the main character has just been left by his wife of 12 years and has now come to the hotel with his brother, who is now a dog. Madame Bovary lives in a world where she’s given by mainly herself and outside sources a sense of unrealistic Romanticism for both the world and mainly love. She thinks she lives in a large wonderful world, but actually lives in a bleak farm town, that is too plain for the likes of her. Both of these characters are basically the same, but in The Lobster, the ignorance afforded to Emma Bovary is more of a cultural sickness. These are people living in a dull, almost flat looking world that think that things like encompassing love exists and bright colors, much like Emma Bovary. The cinematography, beautiful done by Thimios Bakatakis, in The Lobster shows the world to be oddly cold for as impassioned that the characters seem. The faults of Emma Bovary are the faults of the society here, and the results are just as jarring and hilarious. The similarities of character and interpretation in the world almost seem superficial when one considers what really ties together these two works of art. This comes in the way they are presented to the audience. I said earlier that The Lobster took a lot from Madame Bovary, this coming in the way that both works create humor through deflation. Consider the moment of Madame Bovary when Homais, the pretentious pharmacist writes a letter detailing the great achievement of the clubfoot operation that Emma’s bumbling husband has just performed to disastrous effect (not that Homais or most characters know this yet) only to be interrupted with the realistic and unnerving statement about the patient “Help! he is dying! I am going crazy!,” (145), is almost no different in style of deflation than the moments of expectation building to deflation in The Lobster, such as a moment between two women one’s final day before her transformation. The moment is difficult to explain quickly, but two women characters who we as an audience perceive as excellent lovers, in that they seem to have an actual friendship connection, rather than the black and white attraction of similarities that the rest of the society is built on, are meeting for the last time before one is turned into an animal, the other having found her partner on the basis that they both got bloody noses from time to time (ie. black and white attraction of similarities).. The partnered girl reads her a letter of great intimacy: THE LETTER “We always sat together at school, and when I had a problem I always came to you because you had the best advice. When we didn’t manage to find dance partners at the school prom, the fact that we were together at that difficult moment gave me strength. I’m sorry that things have come to this. I’m sure if you had a few more days you would find someone just like I did.” These do not seem to be words of a friend, but one of a lover. This is intimate and beautiful stuff that coupled with the actresses performances brings the audience to Romantic high...but it turns there at the ending doesn’t it. “...find someone just like I did.” It turns and the realism of the moment is heartbreaking, yet funny. It’s frustrating. The letter reads to it’s end as a somewhat pompous, stuck up contemplation of how the writer will remember her good friend, and the other girl smacks her. Realism has trumped our feelings of Romanticism, Flaubert and Lanthimos are playing the same game, and with equally cold but tickling results. Both works are in essence about making the audience feel the way the characters do and the Romantic sickness of The Lobster and Madame Bovary are one in the same as well as the way they use emotional manipulation to deflate in inspiring and hysterical ways. Bibliography: 1. Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. NA. Norton, 2004. Print 2. Lanthimos, Yorgos. Filippou, Efthymis. "The Lobster." Film script. 2014
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AuthorStephen Tronicek. Archives
July 2017
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