On Friday, after a couple of days of unseasonably warm weather, well up into the 60s, it was surprisingly cold. Instead of getting into the high 50s, the temperature barely reached 50 degrees Fahrenheit all day. The leaves were falling quickly, and instead of a curtain of yellow at the back of my house, by end end of the day, out my back window there was nothing longer anything to block the much too early dusk. It reminded me of this famous poem by Emily Dickinson, which usually makes me think of the lingering February snow:
There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons—
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes—
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us—
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are—
None may teach it— Any—
'Tis the Seal Despair —
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air—
When it comes, the Landscape listens—
Shadows— hold their breath—
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death—
It also made me think of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, which previewed on cable the other night. It was on a channel I didn't even think we get, and I only noticed it because I wanted something to watch while I folded laundry. I watched it under un-ideal conditions, starting in the middle, then watching most of the first half from the start, not bothering to watch part of the middle, and not under terrific sound conditions either. But I didn’t like it. I did like both Dogville and Manderlay, and I could almost see the point of Europa, though I didn’t like it much. This quasi-review could be considered to be by way of convincing my husband that he—who didn’t like any of those three films the very slightest bit, and who I’d pretty much predicted will absolutely hate Melancholia if he ever sees it—should ignore reviews like the one by Andrew O’Hehir in Salon, and not bother to rent it when it becomes available on DVD. The post grew out of a series of IM’s along the lines of “did that Salon guy really like it? nothing happened for two and a half hours. and music was really awful. he said what about the music?”
The film has two parts, named for two sisters: Justine, played by Kirsten Dunst, and Claire, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg. (Like Dunst, Gainsbourg is excellent, but I’m sorry to say that I haven’t seen her in anything.) These happen to be the names of characters in two of the most important French language novels of the eighteenth century: Julie, or la Nouvelle Héloïse, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the Marquis de Sade’s sadistic response to Julie, Justine. Claire is not the heroine of Rousseau’s novel, but the heroine’s sensible, somewhat put-upon cousin. “Justine is a reversal of the Nouvelle Héloïse,” wrote Mario Praz in The Romantic Agony, an exceedingly important book about the Romantic movement that I read a very long time ago. However, as far as the film is concerned, I don’t know what this means.
In a kind of prologue, we see dream sequences, some imagined and surrealistic and fitting in with the rest of the story, some very strange but from scenes that will become obvious by the second part of the film, and some depicting the time just before and just after the events that end the film. (This is not much of a spoiler unless you are totally innocent of the film’s publicity. In fact, if like me you saw the end before the beginning, the beginning might leave you still wondering whether what you thought had happened really did.)
(THERE ARE SPOILERS AFTER THIS. Skip to the end to reach the more general discussion again.)
The first half of the movie is Justine’s wedding reception, at her sister’s house. It’s almost impossible to know what’s going on here. Justine first appears to be a free spirit, then begins to seem unstable, and finally seems—possibly—depressed—but if the word Melancholia weren’t in the title, you might never know. Her behavior is outrageously inappropriate. She's hours late for the reception and then leaves the guests further, for hours at a time. It’s not only as if she doesn’t know how to behave at a wedding: it’s as if she doesn’t know she is actually at her own wedding.
Though others’ behavior is inappropriate, too. Her boss keeps tailing her throughout the reception, trying to get her to write her daily copy for him. (She is a copywriter whose promotion to art director, perhaps surprising enough in itself, her boss announces during the toasts.) In fact, her behavior is just what you’d expect in a dream. She wanders around the house and forgets what she was supposed to be doing.
There’s nothing wrong with a film that’s dreamlike, but this plot summary makes it sound much more exciting than it is. Really, nothing happens. People eat. People toast the bride and groom. The wedding cake is cut. The bride’s nephew is put to bed. The guests troupe outside and down the bride’s brother-in-law’s private golf course to drink champagne and set off paper balloons with good wishes written on them, like something out of La Dolce Vita. Every shot is about five times longer than feels necessary. We're just sitting in the audience, watching. And what dialogue there is has no connection that I can see with Justine’s apparent depression; it feels thoroughly arbitrary.
It is possible, obviously, to dredge up a coherent storyline from surrealist storytelling like this—and O’Hehir tries—but that seems to me to flatten out what’s most interesting about it, at the same time that it absolves the artist in advance for not really bothering to depict things for himself, and I guess I just don’t see the point.
I must have found the second half more interesting, since I sat through it well past the time I’d intended to go to bed, and even watched all of the first half, in order to find the connecting link: how people realized there was a second planet hurtling more or less in the direction of our own, and how all those people were gotten out of the brother-in-law’s house, leaving only Justine, Claire, and Claire’s husband and child. The answer to this last question is that the wedding was some time ago, and the guests went home days before. Now, it seems, Justine is so depressed that she can barely manage to get into a taxicab that someone else has hired and has waiting by the curb. Claire doesn’t seem especially fond of her sister, but is determined to help her.
She is worried about the planet, barely glimpsed the night of the wedding, but now discovered and studied and named “Melancholia. Her husband, however, who is some unspecified kind of scientist, says there’s nothing to worry about. He chides her for “going on the Internet again,” and says “the real scientists” know that the idea the earth is in danger is simply alarmism. Well before the end of the film, Claire is herself depressed, and mostly sits on her terrace, often asleep. All four of them gather there daily to observe the progress of Melancholia. Will it strike, or will it pass by and leave all of them unharmed?
I sat through the end to find out, and I was sorry I’d bothered.
(SPOILERS END HERE.)
O’Hehir has an entirely different interpretation of the characters’ motivations than mine, which he's entitled to. He also loves the artistic aspects of Melancholia, which I agree are fine, but which I don’t think add up to anything.
He starts with the assumption that Von Trier’s film is “the ultimate cinematic expression of the German Romantic aesthetic, which was an enormous source of inspiration for Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich,” and gives the Salon reader a deep interpretation along those lines.
First, O’Hehir explains that the score is using some fairly well-known music from Wagner’s overture to Tristan und Isolde, an opera that romanticizes the wish for death. Then he explains how the movie refers to other well regarded films, including those in which the major actors of this one—John Hurt, Charlotte Rampling, Stellan Skarsgård—have previously appeared. So, from the point of view of someone who’s educated about film, Melancholia is very meaningful. I won’t deny that someone who’s very educated about film will have a more worthwhile opinion, in many ways, than someone who isn’t. But even setting aside that these particular meaningful facts are fairly specialized even for most very sophisticated filmgoers, I do want to deny that allusions are enough to make deeply meaningful art.
I didn’t recognize the Tristan theme, and without this recognition, the recurring ultra-romantic orchestral music just reads as overwrought and inappropriate. The cold cinematography and minimalist plot felt spoiled by the inadvertent addition of schmaltz. Every time I heard the orchestral music, I wished it was something more recent, something twentieth-century, something spare and stark like the Musica ricercata by György Ligeti that Stanley Kubrick used in Eyes Wide Shut. By now the Tristan theme and music that sounds like it registers simply love, without the death. Only by recalling the sentence, This is music by Richard Wagner that signifies the Liebestod or Love-Death, would the filmgoer have the experience O'Hehir describes.
Similarly, although I recognize John Hurt, Stellan Skarsgård, and Charlotte Rampling by sight, I’ve seen almost nothing that they’ve appeared in. I’ve seen none of the films Andrew O’Hehir marks as possible influences for this one. Yes, that’s my failing and not the filmmaker’s, but the question is, how much energy should an artist draw from other works that he or she alludes to only in the barest, most tenuous, sense? Is a film (or a novel) that depends, so heavily as this one seems to, on allusions that are detectable only on an intellectual level, and then only at a couple of levels of (sheerly logical) remove, a deep one, or is it shallow?
And yes, those visual shots are beautiful. But they are static. The same angle is shown over and over again, as if the film were instead a painting in some style suspended halfway between nineteenth century decadence and twentieth century minimalist futurism.
What O’Hehir’s insistence that Melancholia is in the tradition of German Romanticism reminds me mostly of are the twentieth century paintings from this exhibition. One of the most striking things about that show, which divided up artists by region (England; France and Spain; Germany and Russia) was how sentimental and soft-edged the German paintings seemed—for the most part—by contrast with the French ones. The placards all explained how much the painters had been influenced by the most shocking recent French styles. But in that age without television, Internet, or cheap color reproductions, few of them can have actually seen the paintings they were trying to imitate. All they saw were words.
