‘The Lobster’, ‘Love’ and ‘Sleeping With Other People’: How To Find Your Perfect Lover At The Movies

How do you know if someone is the love of your life?

Perhaps they share your tastes and interests and get your cultural references. Maybe their defining characteristics – cynicism, boldness, intuition, stubbornness, patience – match or complement your own. Perhaps they’re dynamite in bed, and even the thought of them drives you crazy with lust. Maybe it’s their willingness to perform a grand romantic gesture — or inspire you to perform one for them.

It is a tough issue. I went looking for self-help books on this topic and I found one by this guy called Bret Easton Ellis. It was called The Rules Of Attraction so that sounded promising, but it ended up being about disaffected, bisexual liberal-arts-college kids in the ’80s and didn’t really set down any rules as such. (I also found another book called How To Hug but that turned out to be volume 12 of the encyclopaedia.)

But: three current films might help clarify matters. The Lobster is a deadpan farce set in a dystopian near future, where people have 45 days to couple up or be turned into an animal of their choice. Hipster art film Love follows a disaffected young American who reminisces about his lost French lover in many explicit 3D sex scenes. And Sleeping with Other People, which comes out this week and stars Alison Brie, Adam Scott and Jason Sudeikis, is a traditional romantic comedy about two people who lose their virginity together in college and reconnect years later as best friends with unsatisfying love lives.

Is True Love About Lust, Intimacy, Or Commitment?

Romance is about storytelling. The word arises from French chivalric verse narratives ‘in the Roman style’; until the 18th century, extended works of fictional prose were often called ‘romances’, and the French word for ‘novel’ is ‘roman’.

Sociologist Anthony Giddens argues that romance introduces a narrative into your life: you shape who you are by telling a story about your emotional connection with another person. People who struggle to form an independent sense of self can chase that meaning in relationships with other people.

Psychologist Dorothy Tennov, meanwhile, coined the term ‘limerence’ to describe the intense euphoria of a crush. Usually limerence subsides if the crush is reciprocated and consummated, or is ignored or rebuffed. But some people can become addicted to limerence. They can fixate on one particular person, or perpetually transfer the thrill of a new crush from one person to another without forming lasting relationships.

Sleeping with Other People is writer-director Leslye Headland’s second feature, after the underrated Bachelorette (2012). Much less bleak than its predecessor, it’s fun to watch, with screwball repartee that leans heavily on dirty talk and pop-cultural references. Headland remains intrigued by people stuck in self-destructive behavioural patterns; but the film feels busy and disjointed, like two different romcoms unfolding in tandem, their concerns only occasionally meshing.

Genial womaniser Jake (Jason Sudeikis) banters his way through a succession of flings, but his new boss (Amanda Peet) is discouraging his advances. Jake can see he’s becoming a creepy lecher, but can’t figure out how to change. Meanwhile, Lainey (Alison Brie) is erotically obsessed with Matthew Sobvechik (Adam Scott), a college crush who’s now a tedious gynaecologist. Having cheated on all her boyfriends with him, Lainey must face the fact Matthew doesn’t really care for her, because he’s now marrying someone else.

It’s hard to figure out whether this film is such a mess because it’s overstuffed with subplots, or because modern relationships are messy. The Lobster, the English-language debut of freaky-Greeky director Yorgos Lanthimos, which was released in Australia last week, is much better at depicting – and satirising – the murky terrain of lust, intimacy and commitment, and the impossibility of trying to simplify things.

The Lobster shows sad-sack David (Colin Farrell) navigating a pan-European world that seeks to disconnect commitment from intimacy, even if that requires terror, torture, maiming and murder. At the state-run Hotel to which David reports, the rituals of courtship are rendered nonsensical. The hotel manager (Olivia Colman) is a crisp, no-nonsense ringmaster, and the punishment for failing to join the circus with sufficient gusto or calculation is to be stripped of humanity altogether. (An interesting ethical aside: would you eat or exploit an animal, knowing it was once a lonely person?)

Meanwhile in the woods, a band of fugitive, poncho-clad Loners (led by Léa Seydoux) live side-by-side in stringent self-reliance, brutally refusing any sexual or sentimental attachments.

It’s possible to read The Lobster both earnestly and cynically: it depicts monogamous love as a sham in which the callous prey on the weak; yet it’s intensely romantic in exploring the things we’ll do in pursuit of ‘the one’. Its humour is dark, cruel and absurd; I especially enjoyed the heavy, dispassionate narration by Rachel Weisz, the short-sighted woman with whom David ultimately falls in love.

The scene in which they simultaneously press play on their personal stereos in an illicit slow-dance to Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue’s overwrought murder ballad ‘Where The Wild Roses Grow’ is cinematic perfection. Like the film more broadly, it collides the violent, the risibly banal, and the swooningly tender.

How Important Is The Sex?

Sleeping with Other People occupies an uneasy territory somewhere between When Harry Met Sally… (1989) and Don Jon (2013), where compulsion and companionship meet. As friends, Jake and Lainey can enjoy a frisson of attraction and intimate conversation without any of the consequences of actually having sex. Indeed, the film has a rather Tinder-esque mood of horny bravado; only when Lainey and Jake are together can they admit that sex can be empty and alienating.

The title of Gaspar Noé’s Love is as self-indulgent and inarticulate as everything else about it. Love is not a very good film. But it has a lot of sex in it… and perhaps a generous interpretation is that the film’s tedious prurience mirrors that of its protagonist, Murphy (Karl Glusman).

For Murphy, sex is simultaneously mystical and mechanical. He fucks women compulsively and joylessly under the camera’s dispassionate gaze, as I struggled to tell the various female characters apart. For a film that trumpets its use of 3D, Love conspicuously fails to create an immersive sense of intimacy. Instead, Noé favours stupid, intrusive 3D stunts such as semen spurting towards the audience.

Still, Murphy sees his lust for the mercurial Electra (Aomi Muyock) as a sign that they’re star-crossed lovers. Their lives together unfurl episodically, in the haphazard way of memory, as Murphy spends a day brooding on how much he despises Omi (Klara Kristin), the mother of his son, for driving Electra away.

“Life isn’t easy, Gaspar,” he sobs self-pityingly to the unfortunate child, who is named for the director (at which point I scoffed “Oh, please!” aloud in the cinema). Murphy also despises Electra’s ex, Noé (also named for the director), an older, sophisticated artist. He recoils from responsibility for his own behaviour: in the romance he narrates, everything that goes wrong for him is someone else’s fault. And he fails to realise that he never really knew Electra at all.

Perhaps what we call love is our compulsion to be understood. The ancient Greek ideal of soulmates comes from a myth about how the gods split the original, androgynous humans in half, so we will always yearn to find the missing part of ourselves in another person. From this we get corny lines such as, “You complete me.” And in today’s post-When Harry Met Sally era, we’ve learned to interpret our feelings of being drawn to another person as a nascent sexual attraction.

But the final moments of The Lobster reveal that love can also be an act of surrendering autonomy. If we can let go of our rigid ways of seeing ourselves, perhaps we can find someone who sees us as worthwhile.

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The Lobster is in cinemas now. Sleeping with Other People is out on 29 October, and Love is at Melbourne’s Lido Cinema from 29 October.

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Mel Campbell is a freelance journalist and cultural critic. She blogs on style, history and culture at Footpath Zeitgeist and tweets from @incrediblemelk.