Ceremony

(Dust in the wind: Kirsten Dunst's bride moving across the nighthawk landscape. Image courtesy of Magnolia.)

The moment I saw Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, at Cannes, I felt it superb and breathtaking, the director’s best film since Breaking the Waves. I’ve certainly been drawn to his other work in the decade and a half between those two films, especially Dancer in the Dark and Dogville. 

There’s always a lot to look at and consider in a von Trier film, though too often I found them more formally admirable than emotionally satisfying. I thought Antichrist ravishing to look at and I loved the fearlessness of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s performance. The self-laceration, a constant in the director’s work, I found so off-putting and punishing that much of the bruising second half, I largely turned my head away in disgust.

Of course, the new movie (or more accurately, von Trier) has been notorious since its Cannes premiere. Though von Trier cannot quite, or more defiantly, will not disengage himself from the fallout of his appalling utterances at his Cannes press conference, enough time has passed so the discourse has by necessity shifted to the work itself (unlike Europe, where the film opened in most markets immediately after the festival).

Interestingly, von Trier’s early career (especially Europa) was marked by a Wellesian visual bravado. His movies were not meant just to provoke but change cinema. (When the Cannes jury led by Roman Polanski the year Europa played there failed to see it that way, von Trier naturally denounced Polanski). 

Maybe, von Trier’s comments at Cannes were the logical conclusion. Befitting a movie postulating the end of existence, Melancholia is an annihilating text. It’s fundamentally a work concerned with its own demise. At Cannes, von Trier said the film constituted a working out of his own crippling bouts of depression. 

Breaking the Waves took von Trier's career into a new direction, especially in its pioneering, even experimental uses of the digital format (I especially loved those exquisite chapter headings he framed each part of the story). 

The new title, about a small planet hurtling toward Earth, is composed in three movements: an overture and two long “chapters,” named after the movie’s two leads, sisters Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and Claire (Gainsbourg).

Melancholia is filled with some abstractly beautiful, overpowering moments: in the somber overture, the first images of surrender and apocalypse are of birds dropping from the sky, electrical bolts discharged from Justin’s fingertips, Claire carrying her son across a golf course, her heavy footprints ominous and foreboding, with the harsh strains of Tristan und Isolde on the soundtrack.

“Justine,” is a volatile, heady mixture of private anguish, public ritual and social embarrassment. The chapter details Justine’s extravagant wedding, a bacchanal of abandon, pain and celebration, to the good-looking though astoundingly naïve groom Michael (Alexander Skarsgård).  It starts disastrously, the couple trapped in a ridiculously oversized limo that proves unable, regardless of who's at the wheel, to negotiate the curves of the baronial landscape where the ceremony unfolds.

Von Trier’s Brechtian stylization has always functioned simultaneously as political theater and narrative ploy, situating his work in a strange and surreal physical space, an “America,” that exists purely in the realm of myth and received ideas. Realism, like the planet, is under constant attack. 

It also lays bare the profound cultural and social differences of the two sisters, their different accents, Justine’s colloquial, slangy and very “American,” and Claire’s tight, brittle and French-accented. The distancing is established from the start, moving bit by bit toward a wholly different rapture and judgment.

The movie has some absolutely stunning imagery, given a poignancy and depth because of the angle and point of view contained within. For instance, the most intoxicating moment of the wedding ceremony occurs when the guests congregate outside and create their hand-made balloons, marked with special insignia and well wishes, and they release into the ink-drawn night sky.

Or in the second chapter, when the point of view shifts to Claire, the camera floats above the clouds and looks down on a riding party moving across a charged landscape.  

The central two-part structure, with each section closing just over an hour long, connecting to the frayed consciousness of the two sisters, internalizes and makes palpable the unrest, confusion and mounting dread of the impending destruction. Melancholia majestically moves between inner and outer space. Unlike Antichrist, which I often thought grotesque, von Trier’s linking of sexuality and freedom registers more forcefully.

For a film whose ending is known at the start, Melancholia is never less than unpredictable, tough and even riotously funny (thanks to John Hurt and Charlotte Rampling as the sisters’ parents and Udo Kier as a deranged wedding planner.)

The director has given Dunst a role no other filmmaker has ever claimed her capable of, and she delivers with a readiness, impulsiveness and daring that proves revealing, sad and powerful.

Just like the movie.

Comments

[Cialis]

http://cialisnet.com/ generic cialis ship to canada Cialis Online buy tadalafil online drugs
http://deltaairlinesfree.com/ delta airlines flight status delta airlines flight status delta airlines careers
http://itcialisgenerico.com/ pramil cialis generico cialis prezzo maca cialis 5 mg
http://zithromaxnet.com/ zithromax order online zithromax adderall zithromax online

[Cheap Xanax]

http://klonopincheap.com/ klonopin mixed with percocet generic klonopin lexapro versus klonopin http://valiumcheappill.com/ valium online without a prescription generic valium buy valium without perscription

[Cheap Tramadol]

buy soma generic soma http://genericsomaexpress.com/ carisoprodol soma cheap tramadol without a over the counter http://buytramadolfastdelivery.com/ lyrica and buy tramadol Levitra Without Prescription levitra generic name http://levitraovernightshipping.com/ propecia canada no prescription generic levitra

[Buy Cialis]

http://doxycyclineexpressshipping.com/ buy doxycycline without prescription birth control pills doxycycline doxycycline generic name azithromycin 500 mg buy zithromax without prescription http://zithromaxexpressshipping.com/ grapefruit zithromax without prescription order propecia proscar hong kong buy propecia http://propeciaexpressshipping.com/ propecia price canada

[Buy Cialis Online]

http://buydoxycycline100mgrx.com/ doxycycline dose for lyme disease doxycycline price ic doxycycline hyclate 100mg http://clomidexpressshipping.com/ clomid price drugstore generic clomid buy clomid online clomiphene citrate adipex order adipex online without a over the counter http://adipexexpressshipping.com/ mexico cheap adipex