FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2011
"Melancholia": Lars van Trier gives us a
two-movement "Op 111" Sonata: a wedding reception, and the end of the
world
Like many of Lars Van Trier's films,
I digress and say I tried the idea with a novel
manuscript called 'The Proles' while in the Army. A protagonist, like me, an
enlisted man with TS access, learns of plans for nuclear war, and befriends a Nietzchean figure who can get him through it. In Part II, the war has happened, 'the whole
world goes back to the Bay', but then Bill, surviving shelters, with the help
of friends, makes it to the teleportation point, where all the information that
describes those who will be saved has been uploaded to 'the cloud' , a kind of
Carbonite in a parallel world. They will go on. (I think this novel actually
would work as a Van Trier movie.)
'Melancholia' starts with a prologue of bizarre, artsy
images of the first protagonist, Justine (Kirsten Dunst), which, in retrospect,
tend to suggest she may know what is really coming. The Prelude to Tristan and
Isolde by Richard Wagner plays in especially slow and lugubrious manner. Then the film moves to Part I, 'Justine', a
dramatization of a night-long wedding reception at an estate (it's made to look
like the Hamptons, but it was filmed in southern Sweden like the Dragon Girl
movies), where acrimony erupts and Justine's new groom (Alexander Skarsgard) winds up breaking with her. Hints about what is going on in the sky ('Antares')
crop up.
The second half, Part II, 'Claire', the homely sister
played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, shows the older, married (with young son)
sibling less sanguine about the idea that the world just might come to an
end. Indeed, it's almost as if Van Trier
presents Justine as wanting "the end of the world" as a kind of final
retribution for what has happened. (Some reviewers actually say they feel
"bullied" by this director's films!) The kid follows the progress of
rogue planet Melancholia on the Internet, but then the power goes out. John(Kiefer Sutherland) has tried to reassure Claire and the
kid that the planet will pass the authorities know what they are saying but
that's a lie. Now, naming a planet
"Melancholia" seems to invite speculation about the "melancholic
personality" -- Tchaikovsky fits closer than Wagner.
Other than the Internet (until it unplugs suddenly in
the last power outage), there are no media announcements. People at the party
are pretty isolated (no TV, flat screen or otherwise). But then the bizarre images at the beginning
of the film come to life. There's a hail storm, and power lines, though down, draw lightning
sparks. Pretty soon the remaining family
will assemble into a wicker-man like structure to wait for the end.
Could such a thing happen? The idea of an asteroid hit is pretty serious
(see my disaster movies blog), but the idea of another planet larger than Earth
approaching is almost impossible although there are rogue planets between
solar systems and conceivably there could exist another Pluto or Sedna with a
very eccentric orbit in the Oort Cloud.
(Early in the history of the Solar System there were many more
planet-sized bodies; the Moon is thought to have been created by a collision of
Earth with a Mars-sized body 5 billion years ago). But this is not a 'disaster'
movie in the usual sense, or even like a History Channel documentary warning us
what can happen. It's Lars van Trier, with hints of other films ('Tree of
Life', for example).
As to the Wagner, I do have a DG CD of the Prelude
somewhere, but back in 1961 I had a "1.98" Parliament recording,
Mono, with the Czech Philharmonic. A friend from William and Mary visited me
during winter break after my expulsion (main blog), and I remember we played it
in this basement where I blog. He said, "the music is sensuous" and
thought of the chromaticism as evocative of heterosexual passions run amok.
The wedding reception sequence also made think of how
utterly unable I would have been to perform as society expects as a doting
groom. I would have abandoned Justine,
too.
I guess we can see an anti-marriage argument in the
movie (Justine's-Clarie's Mom gives a rant early on
how she hates marriage), maybe to the disgust of the Maggie Gallagher and
Jennifer Roback Morse crowd. Really, if
the world was going to end in a few days, though, the idea of remaining
interested "until death do us part" isn't so hard, either gay or
straight.
Magnolia Pictures is the distributor. I bet that Strand Releasing wishes it had
grabbed it, to match it's 'Astral City' (Nov. 7). I saw this in the largest auditorium at
Landmark E Street tonight, almost sold out. The theater moved it during the day
from a smaller auditorium as online purchases kept coming in all day.