ARTS & CULTURE
8 Obiter Dicta
A Trio of Film Reviews, Now Available
Tramping through Apocalyptic Wastelands
kendall grant › staff writer
Melancholia (2011) 3/4
Tactfully composed, coolly fatalistic, and conspicuously adult, Melancholia is a broodingly downbeat
self-portrait, a frigid and resonant mood piece with
visuals to die for, and an unwieldy, strangely hypnotic ode to human suffering.
Justine (Kirsten Dunst, Eternal Sunshine of the
Spotless Mind) and Michael (Alexander Skarsgård)
are celebrating their marriage at a sumptuous party
in the home of her sister (Charlotte Gainsbourg,
Antichrist) and brother-in-law (Kiefer Sutherland).
Meanwh i le, an approach i ng rogue planet,
Melancholia, threatens to collide with Earth, pushing
the sisters’ already strained relationship to its breaking point.
Prominently featuring music from the prelude
to Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde, the
poetic, referential succession of near-still images in
the eight-minute prologue so immaculately distills
Melancholia that it makes the two-plus-hours that
follow seem regrettably redundant.
Dunst gives a hard-bitten, incomparable performance that runs the colour spectrum of emotions, even if she is playing an attitude rather than
a character. She’s a fierce savant, a thing of mired
grit and serene beauty, fully deserving of the Best
Actress Award she received at Cannes. Alongside
Gainsbourg’s Claire, the actresses’ work intertwines
beautifully, like twin climbing vines vying for the
attention of the sun.
Nutty Danish provocateur Lars von Trier (Dancer
in the Dark, Dogville) once again demonstrates a
mastery of classical technique, extracting strong performances from his cast while serving up a sturdy
blend of jaw-dropping visual effects and fly-on-thewall naturalism. Working with a new cinematographer, Manuel Alberto Claro, von Trier produces
digitally painted heavenly vistas. Yet Melancholia
represents the director’s ultimate wish-fulfillment
fantasy, von Trier at his best and worst. His latest
fable is nothing without its blaze of majesty. Rooted in
his frustrating, provoking style, it feels as if it’s something from another world, lying behind an impenetrable pane of
glass.
As a window
i nto a mou rnful state of mind,
Melancholia provides the gentlest depiction of destruction in years. With a nod to
Tarkovsky’s Solaris, Melancholia hovers in ambiguity with riveting aesthetic prowess, and it is lent an
exciting frisson by the authenticity of an actress and
filmmaker with first-hand experience of psychological trauma. Von Trier illustriously particularizes the
disintegration of females stuck in an interminable,
patriarchal vortex.
The vision is as hateful as it is hate-filled, but the
fusion of form and content is so exact that it borders
on the sublime. Melancholia floats in an air of supernatural malaise and millennial angst, a melancholy
mirrored in everything and everyone, spinning its
“...Melancholia is a seductive,
sobering, and surreal descent
into dystopia.”
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themes into a blast of cosmic sparkle dust. Its true
subject is melancholia as a spiritual state, a destroyer
of happiness that emerges from its hiding place.
Bedazzlement acts as depression’s surprising byproduct, with its little moments annihilating us day by
day.
Magnetically beautiful and glacially slow in tempo,
like a newborn planet, Melancholia is a seductive,
sobering, and surreal descent into dystopia. A strange
mix of apocalyptic sci-fi and darkly comic social
drama – a remote funereal dirge spiraling in its own
orbit – it may be the perfect match for The Tree of Life
on a bipolar double bill. Stay to the end for the grand
planet-busti ng,
when the tragic
m a g ic of t he
opening scenes is
reasserted.
Leave it to von
Trier to conceive
an intergalactic sci-fi metaphor for a psychological
disorder – and then nearly pull it off. Likely to exasperate as often as it moves, to annoy as many viewers
as it captivates, Melancholia is an intense, exhausting
experience, trailing a dizzying glow of aesthetic satisfaction. The unconverted will remain unconvinced,
but the curious may uncover buried treasure. Proceed
with caution, but proceed nonetheless.
The Road (2009) 2.5/4
With palm-sweating intensity, oppressively tedious,
and horribly credible, The Road is a lugubrious trek
through post-apocalyptic debris; a chillingly effective, savagely beautiful vision of the world’s end; and
a heart-rending, gut-wrenching study of parenthood.
Implacable and unyielding, it’s a cautionary, cryptic allegory about the indomitable