This is not a love song

Rating: Null/10 (23 December 2015)

This is sci-fi only in the sense that Brazil was, a way of baring the social wiring under the floorboards with more bluntness than we would accept in real life; allegory, usually a dreary thing. The comedy comes from absurd leaps and reductions in world and feelings.
But it's a treatise that we really get; the mechanization of contact and love, an obsession with courtship, implying an intolerance or fear of being alone. A man who as soon as his wife leaves him is immediately taken to a secluded hotel where single people have to find a partner in 40 days, such are the rules of the city.
Yes, we see people in such circumstances as these reduced to a childlike meekness, wooden displays of human beings. Yes, we see how the process stifles and gives rise to neglect and callousness. A loss of genuine feeling replaced by compulsions and all of this as something we're meant to recognize around us.
Out in the woods exists a society of outcasts, single people who have escaped confines. But we're not shown any antidote among them; rules that forbid romance are as strident and absurd here, another dystopia of thankless freedom. All told we're shown a world bled of truth and a hodge podge of behaviors in its place. Although the world is ordered by rituals, we get to feel the slow collapse of persons, the perversion of truths.
It's the method used to achieve this disarray that I find the most interesting here and seems novel enough. Some filmmakers stage and have the actors convey, beauty or anguish. Others channel through the eye. This one engineers behaviors, tinkering to create tentativeness as the shape of emotions. The actors don't convey, are not supposed to have real access to their person; we note the fumbling as innocent discovery of real emotions.
But now having mentioned all this, questions. There's something resembling love eventually pursued, but is it even close? Do we have use for films that make as if we're hapless victims of a society that prevents us? The film strips down to where the concrete and wirings show but does it put any of it together as a place in which to live? Surely, we're not a mass of foibles. Surely, there are paths that lead out of our neuroses, we spend our lives finding these out.
I guess this will do just fine for viewers who can find some measure of glee in the gloom. It seems like a tentative step at this point but Lanthimos is setting out to carve, which is half the battle. It will be interesting to know with hindsight what this one was prefiguring. Was he fumbling in the discovery of real emotions, a necessary middle step? Or will he turn out to be someone who film after film controls and reduces just like the villains here?