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Monday, March 18, 2024
March 18, 2024

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Farrell feasts on ‘The Lobster’s’ surreal vision

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Colin Farrell’s matinee-idol looks enclose the soul of a character actor, a combination twisted to impressive effect in “The Lobster.”

The first English-language feature film by celebrated Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos is a macabre, romantic satire of our dating rituals and prejudices. The weird, dense film envisions a world where the pressure to serve as a breeder offers stark choices: Either live emotionally cold and pretending to love, or defend your independence through loneliness in hiding.

Farrell plays a pudgy, mustachioed schlump living in this oddball society. Newly divorced, he is required to find a mate with traits akin to his own in a 45-day stay at a dismal hotel. If he fails, the sinister culture will transform him into an animal and set him loose in the wilderness.

In a phone conversation, Farrell said that what drew him to be an uncommon character in an unusual tale was his admiration for the Oscar-nominated Lanthimos’ work.

“I don’t think I’ve ever used the term, but he’s a visionary director,” Farrell said. “He has such a very clear and perceptive opinion on life and love. He tackles some very absurd ideas on family and community and social systems” without offering specific advice on how to live.

The film’s focus is “the nature of love and what it is or isn’t,” he said. “Anytime you get a writer and director who is creating something that is unusual but also as valid, as his work seems to be, it’s an amazing opportunity to take part of.

Under the rules of the film’s oppressive dystopia, authoritarian controls are inescapable. Our hero escapes confinement and joins the loners hiding in the woods, only to learn that their scary leader (L?a Seydoux) enforces systems of control that are just as repressive. Rachel Weisz plays a good-hearted woman among the anti-romantic loners who may or may not offer him a successful relationship.

As Lanthimos digs into questions about human behavior and the human condition, “his films are a little mythological though they’re without dinosaurs and aren’t set in the distant past. It’s very distant from our world, but he’s holding up a mirror in which we recognize our behaviors and relationships, fears and hopes and responses to things. I knew it would be an adventure that didn’t reflect anything before and in the future couldn’t be replicated.”

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