COMPETITION – Yorgos Lanthimos, surrealism in a time of recession

First revealed in 2009, Yorgos Lanthimos, with his new movieThe Lobster, symbolizes the coming of age of a wave of Greek film makers whose creativity and surrealist tendencies have been stimulated and exacerbated by the crisis.

Film still © Despina Spyrou

Deprived of funding due to the profound economic crisis that has been eating away at the country since the end of the 2000s, the Greek cinema has paradoxically exploded out of a pool of seasoned and interconnected directors which includes Yorgos Lanthimos. In 2009, the success of his second full-length movie, Dogtooth – Prix Un Certain Regard -, focused the attention of the 7th Art on this generation, which, until then, had been budding in the shadows asserting a pronounced taste for surrealism in sometimes experimental films on very low budgets.

With haunted scripts, humor carved with a scalpel and eccentric or totally insane characters, denouncing here the Greek model of family and culture, or there the violence of relationships between men and women, the Greek “weird wave” deploys an esthetic that is willfully brusque, dark and colorless in support of a caustic irony and excels in the use of “subversions born of the conflict between pop and realism”.

Hailing from Athens, where he completed his film studies, Yorgos Lanthimos again taps into this vein of the absurd, of which he is one of the main proponents, in his fourth full length feature. Weary of financial difficulties, for The Lobster he travelled to London where he brought together a cast of experienced actors including Colin Farrel, Rachel Weisz and John C. Reilly.

Co-written with his regular screenwriter Efthimis Filippou and filmed in English, the romantic black comedy set in the future relates the story of a society in which the unmarried are forced to find a soul mate or be transformed into animals. “The Lobster is a rather unconventional love story about the terrible consequence of solitude, the fear of dying alone and the fear of living with someone else”, says the director.

Benoit Pavan

SCREENINGS

Friday 15 May / Grand Théâtre Lumière / 8h30 – 22h30

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