This film is like an inverted pyramid that starts off with good, big juicy ideas and gradually becomes progressively more small-minded, self-conscious and lost in belly-button lint picking. Main ideas being: what is a couple? Who decides? When does the solitary self need another self to be complete? Unfortunately the narrative loses speed as it progresses towards a climax that never really happens. It's a story that lack catharsis. It is crippled by literary development (too wordy!). It tells too much and shows too little -- specially after the escape from the sanitarium. Why? Is the wordiness supposed to be meaningful? If so, the meaning does not come across. The culminating vacuum scene in the highway restaurant is what Woody Allen used to call a "take the camera and run" ending -- the film stops but doesn't really arrive at a conclusion. In spite of the movie going from hot to tepid to deadly dull (honestly, it's one of those movies you start looking at the time about 60% through...) -- some of the acting -- specially that of Angeliki Papoulia and Léa Seydoux -- is truly charismatic. But these occasional jewels -- as the use of our contemporary nowhere shopping mall placelessness in key scenes -- exist amid a very uneven and overall an intellectually pretentious effort. The film suffers from a lack of overall coherence. In sum, a good effort -- but better luck next time.
Review of The Lobster
