Melancholia

Lars Von Trier's 'Melancholia' might be too bleak for most to sink in to. His newest film is an operatic, stylized interpretation of a state of being: Melancholia. It is not about global destruction or the end of the world, but is instead a poetic vision dealing with a personal journey into despair. Dunst is a bride wedded to her own heightened experience of life that is colored by a startling, albeit elegant existential hopelessness. Through this hopelessness, a new world opens. A world illuminated by a kind of grey colored beauty that makes life seem magnetic, cataclysmic, doomed, and ethereal all at once. Planets crash, all is lost, there is no benevolent god. The descent into this kind of mad despondency is a spiritual revelation in itself.

At least four people left the theatre when I saw the film tonight. The pace of the film is slow, and the plot is psychologically driven rather than centering around a sequence of identifiable events. Yet make no mistake, there are subtle, but seismic emotional tectonic plates shifting throughout the course of film, even if the action is limited.

It is disappointing that American film audiences have grown so accustomed to easily identifiable story lines that jump from point a to point b. This sad fact inhibits the dullards from getting anywhere close to having an experience in cinema and instead leaves them antsy and busy fumbling around with their popcorn bags and cokes; dismissing anything unlike the mediocrity they are accustomed to as pretentious, artistic hooey.

Those who are familiar with Trier know that his films are highly influenced by post WWII German cinema. The ideas in German cinema are once again explored in this new film, and those dismissing it as 'overly dramatic' and masturbatory are missing the point. German Expressionism is marked by a stylized form of acting. As Jonathan McCalmont said :



"An emphasis is placed on the mise en scène to the extent that every scene appears to have been assembled in the same way as an artist might frame a painting or a photograph: the cameras are placed in order to film the painted backdrops from a particular angle creating a stage upon which the characters are carefully positioned.These characters and their movements are just as stylised as the backdrops as they too reflect the mental state of the narrator. They are clothed in strange vestments, their facial expressions and ages exaggerated with stage makeup while their movements are oddly sinuous and angular even in close-up...In fact, these exaggerated gestures would come to be embraced as a style of acting in its own right, a style that would come to be seen as one of the calling cards of expressionism....In its simplest and most lasting form, the message of expressionism is that all representational art is expressing an idea and as such, all film is necessarily stylised to one degree or another."


And then there's this:

"Expressionism, as an art movement, enjoyed something of a love-hate relationship with the gothic romances of the 18th century. Indeed, much like expressionism, the gothic is also an attempt to bend the landscape to express a particular mindset. Think, for example, of sinister ruined castles, threatening forests and psychological traumas made flesh in the shape of monsters such as vampires, werewolves and ghosts."


We have only to look at the German playwright Bertolt Brecht to see that it is a common theme in German theatre and cinema to view all art as a representation of life, and subsequently all art should be stylized to the point that it exposes the fabrication involved in the attempt to represent the irrepresentable. However, in confronting the fact that art cannot possibly depict the ineffable, we reach a new way of seeing and appreciating said art. In German Expressionism, and in Gothic art, we reach a heightened state where we are completely aware of our suspension of disbelief and thus discover a more poignant realism. Von Trier seems to have ventured into this complex territory in his newest film.

While watching 'Melancholia', I couldn't help but think of how bold and blind we are as human beings; clinging to ritual (as represented by the wedding ceremony in the first part of the film) in the face of imminent destruction: be it death, planetary demise, madness, or a fall from grace.


I highly recommend this film. I could ramble forever, but do yourself a favor and go see it!