The Land of Lanthimos – that’s Greek writer/director Yorgos Lanthimos – is filled with so much weirdness that, after a while, it all seems so normal.
Ruggedly handsome Irish actor Colin Farrell plays David, a recently divorced dude who, if you were to search the English language, from a to z, for words to describe him, you’d keep coming back to ‘passionately boring.’ David is quiet, stiff and dull. He possesses the kind of personality that is the perfect middle point between magnetic and repellent. He neither attracts nor repels. He just is.
Kicked to the curb by his cheating wife, David checks into a government run hotel in which he’ll have 45 days to find a mate or else he’ll be turned into the animal of his choice. Say what???
That’s right, in this kooky, near future Lanthimos Land – which makes most dystopian hellscapes look sane by comparison – being single is a crime. The goings on in the government hotel are predictably regimented and its insides resemble your average Holiday Inn or Howard Johnson’s – yes, that hellish.
To ensure that each male ‘guest’ maximizes his desire for a mate, and therefore maximizes his chances of connecting with one, the hotel bans masturbation. Oh, yes, occasionally, one of the hot female employees will come to your room, pull up her skirt, sit on your crotch and rub her butt in a circular motion – they’re not monsters, after all. But, she won’t do it long enough for you to achieve release. You see, here, release – in all of its varying forms – is strictly prohibited.
The cast is solid: Olivia Coleman shows up as the Hotel manager, John C. Reilly has a memorable turn as a guy who befriends David before finding himself in hot water with the authorities and Rachel Weisz pops up later on as a rebel living out in the woods with her fellow revolutionaries.
That’s right, it turns out that not everyone in this eharmony hell is down with the whole ‘hook up or be turned into a hare’ policy. There is a band of rebels, hiding out in the woods, who engage in disruptive, guerilla-like missions while trying to stay just one step ahead of the long arm of the law. Yet, in a brilliant twist, this ‘rebel life’ is just as oppressive as the life that these rebels are rebelling against. While the government forces you to couple up or else, the rebel leaders force you to stay de-coupled or else. What’s the ‘or else’ in this case? Without going into the gory details, let’s just say that if you’re caught smooching with a fellow rebel, you will receive something called, ‘The Red Kiss.’ And, no, it ain’t a lipsticked peck on the cheek.
What in the hell is going on in the mind of the Greek of the Grotesque?
It seems pretty clear that Lanthimos is not only sending up our societal obsession with matchmaking – and the joy we often mistakenly believe that will follow from it – but he’s also making a powerful and absurdly delightful comment on the self-defeating nature of extremism of any kind.
Our society’s instinctual attempts to try and force people into one box or another are fair game, here. Whether these boxes are controlled by elites in governments, media, business, religions, households or the average person on the street, our shared tendency to attempt to erase all of the complicated details that naturally come with being a human being is very much still alive in the 21s century.
You see it time and time again. I’m from Toronto – born and raised. And, I couldn’t help but chuckle when one of our past mayors – Rob Ford (you may have heard of him) – one day suggested that there was a war going on in the streets of our beloved city. Apparently, that war was a war against the car – no word on whether it has made it into our school history textbooks just yet. This was nonsense, of course. Though, at the time, it seemed pretty clear to me that, if there ever had been a war on the car, the car had clearly won.
How more absurd can you get, though? Simply put, many citizens who drive cars also cycle and walk. We are never just drivers or just cyclists or just pedestrians. We are, often, one of the three at one time or another. The extremism that leads to pitting a driver of a car against a pedaler of a bike is the same kind of extremism that Lanthimos essays here – though with much higher stakes.
Lanthimos also mocks our society’s obsession with finding proof that two people were meant to be together. It’s not enough for two people to meet, fall in love and learn to build a mutually respectful and loving relationship together. No! They have to be destined to be together! It has to have been written out in the stars, dammit! So, Lanthimos includes one male guest who goes so far as to fake a bloody nose in order to attract the love of a woman who suffers from a condition that causes random nose bleeds. Apparently, seeing blood trickling down from one of his nostrils is enough for her to see a lifelong mate in a total stranger, nevermind that he’s routinely ramming his nose into walls in order to avoid being turned into a goat or a pigeon or whatever other furry creature he’d rather avoid becoming.
For David and Rachel Weisz’s character (simply named “Short Sighted Woman”), it’s their shared short-sightedness which provides proof that they were always meant to be together. In other words, it doesn’t take much to imagine the real life equivalent, be it based on a couple’s shared heritage, hobbies or the fact that they both love the same sports team.
Is Lanthimos a misanthrope? No idea. Clearly, though, he is creatively adept at finding a uniquely dark, uniquely absurd and uniquely funny way to tackle the subject of love and relationships – a subject which, as we all know, has inspired countless dull and predictable movies.
Weird – yes! Disturbing – yes! Boring – no! Lanthimos’ bent look at the absurdity of coupling up – and the self-erasing nature of extremism in any form – is the kind of movie that delights precisely because it zigs when everybody else is zagging.
