Review by Beatrice On 23-Jun-2023
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence
In a reality that has all the appearances of contemporary space-time, being single is a crime that must be punished and atoned for.
Thus, one is deported to a hotel where, through strict, cruel, and grotesque rules, one is obliged to find a soulmate within 45 days.
A ruthless hunt for single rebels living outside the hotel can extend one's stay and thus the chance to find a compatible person.
Yes, compatibility seems to be the element to look for in the other, whether real or illusory.
At the end of the stay, if not paired up, one will be transformed into an animal of their choice.
Meanwhile, those who rebel against the condition of being a couple live in the woods and occasionally return to the city pretending to be conventional couples.
Being in reality allows no exemptions: one can only be a couple, and children are a guarantee of the couple's survival.
After Dogtooth and Alps, Lanthimos continues to depict the deformation produced by conventional societies, with their firm fundamentalism and underlying hypocrisies.
Here, love and friendship emerge in all their radical and grotesque vanity.
Only a disenchanted look at lived experiences can create a new way of seeing habits, social rules, beliefs, and ideologies that everyday life produces.
The functionality of the species denounced by the great philosopher Schopenhauer returns in all its relevance; sexuality is functional to the industrial production of the illusion of love and its consumption; a stratagem used by the genius of the species to seduce the individual and induce them to perpetuate life.
Those who do not conform are marginalized and in constant danger.
Structured like a science fiction film, Lanthimos's film conveys an oppressive sense of loneliness, highlights the narcissistic function of love, and raises an infinite number of intrusive questions.
What is stronger? The fear of living alone or dying alone? The fear of living with someone or solitude?
Why do we seek a soulmate? What drives us to do so?
Are we free or determined by the mesh of the cultural industry?
A confused and illuminated, impenetrable and metaphorical intrigue, narrates the straitjacket our society imposes and artistically paints the canvas of the manipulation of consciousnesses employed by the system to preserve itself and keep individuals submissive, rendering them passive and externally directed, annihilating them as persons and reducing them to an amorphous mass.
A far-from-ideal world acts on our lives and feelings, conveying the illusion of freedom on the one-way street of transgression; that pseudo-transgression is the technique the power uses to impose itself.
The escape into transgression is not only allowed but promoted by authority because it is a tactic of submission; it is the illusion of feeling free without being free, and compared to passive obedience, opposition is only antithetical.
There is no escape, Lanthimos seems to say, and even in love, no one loves the other but everyone loves what they have created with the material of the other.
"Lovers who spend their lives together cannot say what they want from each other. It certainly cannot be believed that only for the trade of carnal pleasures they feel such a passionate desire to be together. It is then evident that the soul of each wants something else that it is not capable of saying, and therefore expresses it with vague premonitions, as if divining from a mysterious and dark depth."
23-Jun-2023 by Beatrice