In anticipation of 12/21/12, this past year saw a return of the doomsday film. Melancholia was an okay end-of-the-world movie, but for this fan, it was not a very good Lars Von Trier film. Perhaps a third viewing is in order.
If after all, the end of the world is supposed to be the time to say what you really feel, Lars Von Trier is going out with a cheap smirk, a potshot-ridden parable abut loathsome individuals' final moments as part of a rogue species in a vast, indifferent universe. All of which sounds okay on paper, but Von Trier's scorn comes off as sophomoric, like a bad soap-opera -- or more precisely, the extent to which the characters are living clichés shouldn't also be the extent to which Lars Von Trier's end-of-the-world film is simply flat. But it is.
Because Von Trier is a filmmaker of considerable import, a fan feels compelled to second-guess his appraisal. It is possible that I am simply running the same backlash program that others ran during Von Trier's prior gear-shifts, though I'll also note that while Melancholia is different from much of his other work, it is sufficiently akin to Anti-Christ
I also concede that at this point, I have been conditionedto expect a -- pardon the phrase -- deep impact from every new Von Trier film.But even when I distill out oversized expectations that practically guaranteeanti-climax, for this viewer, Melancholia,though temporarily seductive, is the first Von Trier film which I've forgottenso quickly after leaving the theater, and also when turning off the TV (I sawit at the NYFF and on cable.) Having said that, herewith, a few thousand morewords.
As I watched the hallucinogenic foreshadowing in Melancholia's ballyhooed opening sequence, it occurred to me (andlikely only me) that perhaps a depressed Von Trier hath recently done atherapeutic bout of mushrooms or a designer drug, in which case, good on ya,LVT.
At the NYFF press screening, mouths were agape, eyesentranced during this sequence – and with good reason, as it's fun,end-of-the-world-movie stuff: the slo-mo planetary crash also evokes a pupilaryexplosion, making for a macro-micro meditation, as well as a kind of update toUn Chien Andelou's razor-slit eye (yet forme, the juxtaposition of cosmic imagery and classical music pushing our ooh
After a tombstone-etched director's credit, we see the firstof many incomplete acts, and what could be viewed as a a ham-fisted potshot atthe end of a species' specious Empire: a white stretch limo, stuck, its verylength choking a too-sharp curve in a castle road, its newlywed passengersforced to abandon their gilded chariot. To my fertile imagination, KirstenDunst sounds like John Wayne (didn't he wear wedding dresses?) when she says"Well I can see it's not lookin' good." Of course, Von Trier could simply beloosely using the opening of Earth Vs Flying Saucer
Once again, in a career well-punctuated with literally fatalfemmes, (Vampire Chronicles, Virgin Suicides, Marie Antoinette
When Justine looks out at her never-to-be honeymoon castle'sgreen, resigned to a fate not of her choosing, Dunst kind of reprises the finalmind-state of her character in Marie Antoinette, and it's a bit of smart casting of an actor with an empathetic appealto women by a director who, despite accusations of misogyny (against which Ifind myself jovially defending VonTrier, tween-screens at this year's NYFF)really knows something very deep about the female psyche. Not for nothing doactors want him to direct them to major prizes (WIKItrivia: PenelopeCruz was supposed to play Justine, having inspired Von Trier to model Claireand Justine after the sisters in Genet's The Maids, , which she sent him to consider developing) nor for nothing did he produce successful porn under the PUZZY POWER manifesto.
We come to know the wedding party via their revelatorytoasts at the reception, which kind of reminded me (and likely only me) ofphotographer Larry Fink's very interesting Weimer Era mock-up of Team Bush 2which was rejected by The New Yorker --swapping out of course, neo-cons, clowns and prostitutes for a wedding party of societal archetypes that make easy targets for Von Trier.
Justine's boss toasts her with an announcement of her promotion,and a reminder of her deadline – he has, in fact, hired a lackey, Tim,(Brady Corbet) to follow her around, awaiting her delivery of a tag line for aphoto that looks like a post-bomb-blast runway, contorted model corpses strewnabout; her parents' toast turns into the airing of dirty laundry, and Michael,her gee-whiz groom-boy can barely muster the "luckiest man on earth" line thatLou Gehrig delivered (apropos, asMichael too, is terminal, so to speak, and his speech also constitutes yetanother Von Trier equusreference, given Gehrig's nickname, "The Iron Horse" – or more literallyand ultimately perhaps symbolically: he is a damn Yankee with cancer); herFather uses his toast to work in a sly invite to the ladies seated at histable, whose company he will choose over his desperate daughter, when, atevening's end, she pleads with him to stay (he agrees, but instead bails onher, leaving a "Dear Justine" note).
Claire, (Charlotte Gainsbourg, who can seemingly do no wrongthese days) Justine's ever-fretting sister and wife to Keifer, never gets hertoast in (but she shares the story of her life as an artist and explains herworking relationship with Von Trier in this exclusive interview).
Charlotte Gainsbourg can rock leather elbows on a tweed coat, fully disproving Morrissey's axiom on Track 1, Side 1 of Solo Lp 1. She earnestly, affably discusses her self-perception and how, despite a life begun at 12 in film and music, she doesn't consider herself an artist, and how this may actually be reassuring, affording her a healthy distance form the trappings of compulsory creation of Art. She also talks about returning to music 20 years after the death of her father, with whom she recorded the controversial "Lemon Incest" at age 12; her work with Lars Von Trier on Anti-Christ, for which she was voted Best Actress at Cannes; recording with Beck.
The toast delivered by Justine's mother, Gaby (Charlotte Ramping, who can also seemingly do no wrong) serves as a calm rebuttal to her husband's toast during which he (in a bit of bad, force-written drama) bizarrely describes her as domineering, levels scorn (with a perfect head-nod) toward the men at her table, calmly stating a detestation of marriage, "especially when it involves some of my closest family members".
photo c. cinema.theiapolis.com
The Rampling documentary The Look reminds me of Bacall's use of the phrase "the look" for a photo caption in her auto-bio, and Rampling's similarity to Bacall reminds one of the fact that Von Trier insisted on taking the chambers directly below the room of Bacall, whom he greatly admires, during the filming of Manderlay.
There seems to be another pointed assignment -- and a caseof Art irritating other Art -- in the casting of Kiefer Sutherland, whojustified American exceptionalism playing a kind of realpolitik
Surprisingly, the great Udo Kier, playing the kind of vampywedding planner one sees in Father of the Bride Umpteen: Another Sequel!,
The aforementioned Charlotte Rampling as Gaby, the acerbic,downright venomous, battle-scarred matron, rounds out the clichés, thoughRampling preserves the elemental truth that informs cliché, doing a fine job asthe only family member whose advice is worth a damn. In a dress of faded skyblue with gray concentric circles emanating from the fetal center like aradioactive shockwave, the half-life of which can be measured on her face, sheadvises her daughter, who expresses her malaise to her privately: "Well you canstill wobble, can't you? Wobble the hell on out of here", emerging like aradioactive survivor of nuclear (family) warfare, a terminally toxic witness,warning someone at the edge of the cloud to save herself, delivering what wasto my feeble mind the single authentic moment in the film. This is followedimmediately by what I also saw as the only unmanipulatively heartbreaking shotin the film: Justine, post Mom-Daughter confab, shaken, seated bolt upright atthe edge of the party, embodying the title for the 1988 NYFF's opening nightfilm.
Of course, Dunst is too depressed and fearful to ever flee(later in the film she makes it to town, but comes back, fully crippled bydepression and cared for by Charlotte in a scene which reminded me of BibiAnderssen caring for Liv Ulmann in Persona– more on that below) and in any case, nobody's going anywhere, as MotherNature – make that Von Trier's cold, mechanical universe -- is to havethe final say.
But as the wedding night wears on and EOTW slowlyapproaches, instead of the bride enduring a violation in lieu of honeymoon eros
Von Trier shoots their coitus abruptus
And in a universe of infinite possibilities (and also aHollywood full of bad ideas) it is possible to imagine a Hollywood Rom-Comre-write of this, in which said lackey is actually an earnest young man, whothe female lead chooses over her stuffy, arranged-marriage husband, and theyride off on the golf cart together like in The Graduate
One particular Hollywood element one wishes to imagine theabsence of in this film is the overbearing superimposition of music – no,I don't expect Dogme 95 (actually, a Dogme 95-adherent EOTW film would beinteresting) -- but there are several instances where music is simply overkill,and in a moment of art unintentionally indicting itself, we have Justine'smockery of Charlotte's pastoral vision for the EOTW: "Maybe some music,Beethoven's 9?" And it could be argued that her unvarnishedopinion (which I won't quote here) of Claire's idea to have "a glass of wine onthe terrace" might also be apropos inappraising Von Trier's over-use of music.
On the lo-tech/high-impact side, Melancholia
THIS MORTAL COIL – speaking of which, the 4ADmulti-artist project has released a boxed-set well-worth one's listening time.
Metaphor is also perhaps more directly (and brutally) foundin the similarity between the circles on Mother Gaby's dress design, and theclothes hangar coiled atop the doom-o-meter, for crude applications along thelines of dilation, regret and termination, which one needn't describe preciselyherein.
There is also some nice photography and a few interestingvisual effects: when Claire is awakened in a lounge chair, the shadow of a treehangs on her like a scythe. Cut to an empty chair, then to Claire finding Joedead in the barn. The electric currents emanating from the power lines simplygive one a terrific cinematic pause to wonder what would actually happen duringthe early stages of planetary collision, (and why did the golf cart's battery start when the car's wouldn't?Presumably both have magnets which would be affected) while Justine's trippy,electric hand-trails are perhaps more evidence of Von Trier's recent episode inpharmacopoeia, perhaps while watching the wood-spirits in Avatar
The costume design in this film is also smart (we areactually living in an age of particularly lucid costume design, and by this Idon't necessarily mean grand, nor even stylish, but rather, highly poetic). Whetherit's the aforementioned matron's dress, Justine's teardrop earrings (finalgranules in a long process); her first non-depressed-morning silk tunic, like aMaxfield Parrish nymph; the slow exposing of Claire's bare shoulder throughdifferent scenes paralleling her slow acceptance of an agonizing reality thatstrips away comfort of a flimsy shawl, revealing a single, knottedshoulder-strap, like a final curtain to be pulled, a naked truth finallyembraced, after which she dons black.
To be certain, Justine was also dressed exquisitely as shelay along a moonlit riverbank, discovered by a silent Claire who skulks in thebushes peering -- as if in a Rousseau -- at her noble, savage sister under thenight sky. Perhaps like Tarkovsky's would-be warderer-off of the EOTW in TheSacrifice, Justine is offering herself tothe orb, also burning down the house, in a manner of speaking. Anotherbeautiful nude offering of sorts can also be found in the worthwhile meditationon penance, redemption and parallel universes-made-manifest, AnotherEarth.
As doom approaches, different personas play out –Sutherland, who began as the reassuring expert of sorts, follows the CIA dictafamously re-appropriated by Barbara Kruger, goingthrough a familiar authoritarian all-purpose dialectic useful for snafus,depressions, disasters, wars.
Justine emerges as a mother-sister-figure of sorts, increasingly serene as she undergoes a visceral transformation into an almost feral state, fully grasping that she will soon be sprung from this mortal coil. At the breakfast table she eats jam insouciantly with her fingers, and as the crisis emerges, she is uniquely able to placate Claire's child Leo, demonstrating an intuitive wisdom and coming into her own as "Auntie Steel-breaker", the name conferred upon her by said nephew.
And this reversal reminds me of a comment delivered byanother audience member I spoke with, that Von Trier is "A depressive who makesdepressing movies for other depressives". To be certain, there is adepressive's revenge fantasy element to this, and I'm guessing that in 2011, alot of depressed sisters crashing on their married siblings' couches watched Melancholia (via video-on-demand) with glee. When Justine, challenged by Claire to empirically prove the coming EOTW, says, "I know thingsand when I say we're alone, we're alone", I was reminded of a scene in theover-rated Marcy Mary May Marlene,wherein the couch-surfing, insecure, haunted sister, incensed at her oldersister's condescension, tells her that she is in fact a "leader", patheticallyrepeating what a cult leader had manipulatively told her.
I was also reminded of asking Von Trier, after the NYFF 47screening of Anti-Christ, about hispositing of two individuals with very different worldviews into a silent,unforgiving natural environment, à la Persona
I'll also note that irrespective of Von Trier's stated intention to not do so, when I asked Him at NYFF 47, if he ever sought to strip away the coping mechanisms and societal constructs that are used to obscure the elements – be they mysterious or unpalatable or both – of a harsh, undifferentiated nature (see the fox in Anti-Christ), to my mind it emerges that Anti-Christ and Melancholia, constitute what one might call his "Man VS Nature" series, insofar as you have a common theme of individuals of deeply differing viewpoints on, well, the nature of nature, put in a situation wherein these world views do battle in existential opposition as they find themselves directly in the face of primal circumstances (a desert island, the deep woods, deep space) making for a diptych (which again on LVT time equals a trilogy) going from Adam and Eve – make that She and He -- straight through to The End of The World, meditating on innate good and evil, and a stripping away of methodologies certainties: the presumed comfort of therapeutic psychology in Anti-Christ, and the liminal, casual anthropocentrism of Melancholia; in both cases, optimism, which began as a certainty, was laid waste to, en toto.
When I mentioned Nietzsche, Von Trier said he'd had Anti-Christ on the desk by his bed for forty years, but still hadn't read it. Irrespective of this, Von Trier is, in addition to many other important things, a master stripper-away-er (as it were) and yes, of course it's probably not a very good idea to ask any director this point blank, but again, EOTW, like the deep woods of Anti-Christ, is by definition a stripper-awayer (as it were) of false constructs.
In further pursuit of the Man VS Nature theme: Where themale, through blunt force, defeated – or rather silenced momentarily afemale examining nature in Anti-Christ,in Melancholia -- again a film inwhich a marginalized female insists that Evil be acknowledged -- a man killshimself and the female embraces Nature. He won the battle in Anti-Christ, but She wins the war in Melancholia, while ultimately, nothing more nor less significant than one of an infinite number of cosmic dice rolls has the final say, as it were.
As I finish this, I hear the news reports of intra-Europeanschisms and fissures and I contemplate Von Trier possibly saying, amongst manyother things in Melancholia, that theworld will end before Europe becomes a single nation-state, like America -- a notion perhaps manifested during the scene in which Michael, in an effort to be tender, proffers a photo of land he's purchased where Justine can go on uglydays. Pointing out the apple trees (which seem to be aligned along a lane ofdoom like the lawn at the castle) he explains: "These particular apples arecalled Empire Apples" delivering what could be viewed as a fairly sophomoricmetaphor. Promising to keep the snapshot with her forever after hekinda suggests she do so reminding me of Willie (John Lurie) in StrangerThan Paradise giving Eva (EszterBalint) a dress to wear, so shecan fit in, in America – just as we see the dress in the garbage on thenext scene, we see the photo left behind, creased on a chair.
Audience members were particularly silent as the credits rolled, and I spoke with a few who hated Anti-Christ but loved Melancholia, andthat was all I needed to know, to predict that this would be his best-sellingfilm in the U.S. But for me, the whole experience felt over-informed by thesense that I was watching a Von Trier film at a major festival rather then asense of being enveloped in cinema.
Additionally, this time Von Trier's empathetic femaledoesn't feel like an originally conceived character, but rather, she feels of ademographic – LVT seems to be pandering, depicting an audiences'repressed rage back to itself as a marketable cinematic adventure – andagain, this sounds okay on paper, but this time he creates nothing reallyunique in the process, though again, this will likely be his best-sellingpicture in America, where we love a tragedy with a happy ending, hence the successof A Star Is Born variant, TheArtist.
Even the final scene in which Justine, Claire and Leo holdhands in a wooden teepee frame with no cover, delivering an image providingperhaps a literal, visual, damnation of a land stolen, felt trite, like a rock-starshaving his head in penance when something bad happens.
When attacking cliché, Von Trier usually does so with small,clear drama, but in Melancholia, hehimself has used one, and failed to transcend. Admittedly, it is perhaps unfairto hold Von Trier to the standard he has set, but perhaps it is a fan'sobligation to an artist who is capable of so much. Make no mistake about it: Melancholia is definitely an ok, old school, trad, end-of-the-world movie. For thisfan, it's also definitely not a very good Lars Von Trier film. Perhaps a thirdviewing is in order.
File Under "Wrestling Ourselves off A Cliff, YetAgain"
Those beautiful northern lights we see in the beginning ofthe film? Von Trier may have to pay a copyright violation fee for shootingthem, much as he may have had to pay for the use of the famous paintings, asapparently Norway and Finland are battling over the trademarking rights for TheNorthern Lights, with, apparently millions of tourist dollars at stake.
File Under "How Do Ya Like Them Odds?"
File Under "Eternal Recurrence?"
At the NYFF two years ago, Von Trier mentions the infamous episode ofNietzsche hugging a horse in Turin. Fast-forward two years, and Béla Tarr, without ever depicting the actual incident -- turns this story into The Turin Horse, one of themost meaningful cinema experiences I've ever had. Seeing and hearing Tarr elucidate his philosophy of shooting in-person during a NYFF Q&A session with Film Society of Lincoln Center Director Richard Peña (whom Mr. Tarr warmly acknowledged as the reason he came to New York for the 2011 NYFF) was a cinema life-highlight for yours, truly -- and apparently one of many to come for all New York cinephiles, as this February FSLC are curating a not-to-be-missed-under-any-circumstances full retrospective of Mr. Tarr's films, "The Last Modernist: The Complete Works of Béla Tarr"