George Ghon on MELANCHOLIA

Andreas Gursky's Rhein II

Doom and gloom are high on the agenda nowadays. Lars van Trier’s poetic Melancholia is one of the more beautiful jigsaw pieces that deal with the sombre mood in an arresting way, creatively speaking. A big blue planet named Melancholia approaches earth on a trajectory, which will eventually lead to a fatal crash, terminally extinguishing humanity. Given that background, we follow the wedding party of Justine (Kirsten Dunst) at a remote, neo Gothic estate, owned by the rich husband (Kiefer Sutherland) of Justine’s sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg). The newly wed couple (with Alexander Skarsgård as Michael) arrives in a pristine mood, trying to wiggle their oversized limousine up a narrow mountain road, delaying their arrival, but keeping their state of general excitement and mutual enjoyment. Only when faced with the party guests, her parents (a confused John Hurt and a cold Charlotte Rampling), and her unscrupulous boss (Stellan Skarsgård), Justine’s fragile emotional composure comes to light and we witness the mental pains of a pretty girl, which seems to have, by all conventional standards, a pretty good life. 

If we remember the Justine of de Sade’s eponymous novel as a victim of society in pre-revolutionary France, whose virtuous intentions get callously exploited by powerful figures (representations of church/law/aristocracy), Lars van Trier’s character is a bit more subtle, her suffering largely self-inflicted, or so it seems. There is no apparent traumatizing event that links to her mental condition. The Melancholia from which she suffers comes out of the blue, like the menacing planet that is spiralling towards earth on its fatal course. On a superficial level it could be afflicted by it, but speaking in more symbolic terms, the planetary crash could act as metaphor for the threat that Melancholia, the illness, is to contemporary society. In this context, Slavoj Zizek’s book ‘Living in the End Times’, which was originally published in 2010, gains new relevance. In a chapter on depression he asks the crucial question: ‘If the twentieth century was the Freudian century, so that even its worst nightmares were read as (sado-masochistic) vicissitudes of the libido, will the twenty-first be the century of the post-traumatic disengaged subject (…)?’ The libido recedes in that transformation, leaving Thanatos to overpower Eros. 

Or the libido takes its funny turns, to say the least. Instead of procreating with her understanding husband, Justine opts for the quicky with the dumb office boy on the nightly golf course to momentarily please her wavering sexual desire. It has to be said that the men in this film don’t live up to their roles. The boss is an asshole, the father doesn’t listen, and the only thing the brother in law can think of is his money. The male characters are bystanders on the sideline, one-dimensional lightweights that merely accessorize the plot, which is driven by the emotionally complex interactions of the two sisters, Justine and Claire. As the end of the world approaches, they have to face the tragedy without any masculine comforting. Claire is ridden with terror, but Justine doesn’t fear the approaching apocalypse. Mankind is evil, she concludes, and the universe better off without it. She is longing to die, can’t wait to swap the bland reality she experienced for something that might turn out to be spiritually more fulfilling. 

This abstract desire to annihilate the human race and trade it in for something more sublime, is equally apparent in Andreas Gursky’s photograph Rhine II, which just sold for $4,3m at Christies in New York and broke the prize record in a photography sale. The large print shows the grey Rhine River framed by its green bed under a foggy sky. Ultra-minimalist composure, strangely attractive, but with every human trace carefully removed in the retouching process of the digital file. Why are the aesthetes longing for a post-human equilibrium so much these days? Both Gursky and van Trier suggest a pretty radical solution to the struggles of society in the 21st century: Complete wipe out. Let’s hope that this message can be seen in a metaphorical way, too, and be understood as a mere hint that it is time to change, soon. 

MELANCHOLIA played Cannes 2011 where Kirsten Dunst won Best Actress, and Toronto. It opened earlier this year in the Czech Republic, Denmark, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Brazil, France, Estonia, the Netherlands, Greece, Ireland, Romania, the UK, Germany, Italy and Hungary. It opened earlier in November in Spain, Canada and the US. It goes on release in December in Portugal, Slovenia and Australia. It opens in January in Hong Kong and Turkey and in February in Japan.

ANTICHRIST - emotional psychodrama

ANTICHRIST is, to my mind, Danish auteur Lars von Trier's best film since DANCER IN THE DARK. Forget the hype - ignore talk of genital mutilation and talking foxes - at core this is a deeply felt, beautifully filmed story of grief and religious guilt.

The film opens with a prologue shot in black and white, in extreme slow motion, set to a haunting aria about escaping tragic fate. Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg play a married couple having passionate sex. Their is graphic nudity, but it's not sensational. The camera focuses on the wife's face as she climaxes. The footage is intercut with scenes showing the couple's toddler leaving his cot, climbing onto a table and falling out of their apartment window to his death. It is immediately apparent that Lars von Trier is going to be tackling issues of women's sexuality as conceived in religious propaganda: a woman can be a mother or a whore, and the price of climax is to lose the child.

We then cut to the first chapter in the story, "Grief", and the movie switches back to real-time, colour and naturalistic acting. The chapter sees the mother unable to move beyond grief, consumed with guilt at having left her son unattended. The father, a psychotherapist, wants to take her out of hospital and off meds. He thinks grief is natural and has to be confronted and worked through. She thinks he's arrogant, but submits to his plan. The acting in this chapter is superlative. I've never seen such an honest and touching evocation of guilt on screen. Charlotte Gainsbourg earns her Best Actress award at Cannes in spades. And when you consider that Lars von Trier is often seen as a technical master, but just a jokester, this is simply stunning work.

The second chapter, "Pain (Chaos Reigns") sees the couple journeying to their country cabin in the woods to confront the wife's fear of "nature red in tooth and clear". The husband tries to remain rational and evidently loves his wife dearly, but even he is saying unnatural, Shakespearian, portents - wild animals disfigured, damaged and dying. The wife can't shake off her fear: nature is dying and evil, "Satan's Church". She wakes up one morning, seemingly cured, but her husband distrusts the cure, as do we. Once again, the acting and emotional content in this chapter is searing, and the subtle build-up of dread masterly. I particularly liked the way in which DP Anthony Dod Mantle warps the image at the edges to give a feel of surreality. Sometimes the imagery is so beautiful it's as heart-breaking as the content. The only problem is the final image, where a fox intones "chaos reigns". We all laughed. Maybe that's what we needed? Maybe it's Lars von Trier showing us that even in the midst of the most serious material he can still be a prankster. Either way, I think the movie would've been better without it. But then, it wouldn't be a Lars von Trier film!

The third chapter, "Despair (Gynocide)" is where the stuff that you've read about starts to happen. The wife was writing a thesis on the medieval church's cruel treatment of women which centred heavily on sexually active, powerful women being burned as witches. While researching in the log cabin a year ago, she came to the conclusion that the women actually deserved that punishment. In other words she has become a self-hating woman - a female misogynist. What follows in this chapter and the next, "The Three Beggars", is that the wife descends into madness and takes out her anger on her husband and herself. It is savage - both graphic - and emotionally freakish. But that is all, I think, called for. I never felt that the material was sensationalist, and, once again, Charlotte Gainsbourg must be praised for making it seem credible. I love the ambiguity of whether her greatest fear was "Me" as in herself of "Me" as in her husband. I love the ambiguity of whether she really was complicit in her son's murder. And I love the physical ambiguity in the prologue.

I think the real problem with ANTICHRIST is the sensationalist title, the aforementioned Fox scene, and the fact that it is going to be the victim of its own hype. The movie actually struck me as a bit banal - I had thought it would be up their with SALO but it's nowhere near. But when you reflect on it calmly, and see it for what it is, it remains an impressive, provocative and actually very moving piece of work. And no, a movie about a woman turned misogynist is not, of itself, misogynist, any more than BORAT was racist.

ANTICHRIST played Cannes 2009, where Charlotte Gainsbourg won Best Actress. It opened earlier this year in Denmark, Italy, Finland, France, Poland, Norway, Sweden, Kazakhstan and Russia. It opens in the UK on July 24th, but is on preview at the Curzon Soho next week. It opens in Spain on August 21st; in Brazil on August 28th; in Germany on September 10th; in Belgium on September 15th; in Romania on October 16th; in the USA on October 23rd and in the Netherlands on October 29th.

THE BOSS OF IT ALL - Lars von Trier is back to his comedic best

Lars von Trier is BACK BACK BACK with a movie so funny, so clever, so brilliant that I can almost forgive him MANDERLAY. Leaving behind all the ludicrously pretentious stripped-down super-didactic nonsense of the past few years, Trier goes back to his crazy-comedic KINGDOM HOSPITAL days. He even announces at the start of the movie that we are simply in for a good time - a bunch of laughs at the expense of the arty-farty crowd. But of course, as ever with Trier, the movie is not as simple as all that. You can take it as a light-hearted comedy and that's fine - but it is also a very funny and sharp satire at the expense of the movie-director/actor relationship and the restrictions of the comedy genre.

The movie is filmed in a near Dogme style - all natural settings, minimal lighting, zero production design and unpolished photography and deliberately jumpy editing. Given all this, in combination with the deadpan humour, it feels a lot like a more brilliant Danish version of the hit UK comedy series, THE OFFICE. Coz what we have hear is a fly-on-the-wall look inside a small Danish IT company. The actual owner of the company is a loveable teddy-bear of a man called Ravn. Needing a scapegoat for the unpopular management decisions he's forced to make, he invents a "Boss of it all" who works in the US and forces Ravn to do all the bad stuff. Now, Ravn wants to sell the company to a hysterically anti-Danish Icelander and rake in the proverbial phat cash. So he hires an an ueber-luvvie actor to play the role of the boss of it all. There follows a lot of situational comedy around the mistaken identity and the actor going off message and off-script.

What can I say? This is funny - it's clever. I have no idea when it will get released in the US or UK but you absolutely HAVE to check it out!

THE BOSS OF IT ALL goes on release in Denmark on December 8th 2006. It just played London 2006. It goes on release in the UK on February 29th 2008.

DEAR WENDY - Billy Elliot goes Gangsta!

DEAR WENDY tells the tale of a bunch of losers in mid-town America. The kids club together and found The Dandies - a club for pacifists who dress well, read poetry..... They also meet in darkened mines, learn everything they can about guns and become crack-shot shooters. Crucially, though, they never fire a gun in "open warfare". The key is to allow the fascination with guns and mastery of them to be empowering rather destructive. And empowered they are. The kids find friendship, community, self-respect - they start playing music again (largely, bizarrely, 60s hits by The Zombies). Their guns become their girlfriends, named, beloved. The kids get laid, get tits, get top hats. Yes, yes. Into this off-whack self-help group steps a black kid called Sebastian. He makes a move on Dickie's gun, his girl and his gang. Is it any surprise that in a movie populated by armed-up, sexually frustrated, jealous teens, it all ends in a gun-fight and tears before bedtime?

This being a Lars von Trier-scripted film, the America of DEAR WENDY is somewhat off whack. Poor white miners can afford to hire black maids and kids drink tea. Perhaps even more bizarre than drinking tea, these US kids sometimes affect a "Brideshead stutter" - mimicking fictional toff and cult figure, Antony Blanche! I mean, seriously, how many mid-western teens have even heard of a novel about a bunch of Catholic aristo repressed homosexuals? Other Trier-isms include the fact that the destructive violence is introduced by a young black kid. And on one level, much as he denies it in interviews, I am sure he would love for this movie to be read as a searing indictment of America's gun culture as well as Bush's foreign policy. A bunch of insecure people armed up and firing first out of fear and misunderstanding. Iraq, anyone?!

But this movie is better than the recent von Trier agitprop. This is because DEAR WENDY is directed by Thomas Vinterberg, one of my favourite directors. He came to notice with the haunting drama Festen, which won, among other things, the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes. Handed a dry polemic fuelled by conceptual hocus-pocus, Vinterberg breathed life into the script. The sets are great and shot with intimacy on hi-def video. The kids all invest the film with energy and goofiness. Don't get me wrong - DEAR WENDY is not a dramatic tour-de-force - but it's a perfectly enjoyable coming-of-age story and not as pretentious as the reviews suggest

Best of all, the message of the film, if there is one, is rather the opposite to what the US critics would have you believe. I find the film to be an indictment of liberals who deceive themselves that they are pacifists and immune to the allure of guns, while being as vulernable to gun culture as paid-up members of the NRA. The directer himself was raised in a honest-to-goodness hippie commune in Denmark, where "gun" was a dirty word, and admits to his fascination with guns. Moreover, the movie indicts Dickie, the leader of the gang, for trying to "dandify" Sebastian, the convicted criminal. If there is a moral to this film, it is that liberals should cut the crap, admit how beholden they are to gun culture, and stop talking about redeeming society of violence. The ultimate gunfight is inevitable. America may be damned, but so if everyone else.

DEAR WENDY premiered at Sundance 2005, went on limited cinematic release over the summer and is now available on region 1 and region 2 DVD. The movie cost $8m to make and took $100,000 on theatrical release. This should not be taken as an indication of its quality.

MANDERLAY – Lars is a whole lot dumber than he thinks he is

When Lars von Trier made the movie, THE IDIOT, the advertising slogan was “You are a whole lot dumber than you think.” Well, people who live in glass houses should avoid throwing stones. But before we get to my thoughts on his latest movie, MANDERLAY, I must confess that, for the first time in my life, I actually walked out of the screening of MANDERLAY at the London Film Festival. So what follows is not a review but a “coming to terms” with why I did this. But first, some context…..

Lars von Trier is a film-maker who has consciously created a persona as a bad boy auteur who is tough to work with but produces controversial uncompromising works of art. His need to create a high profile began from the earliest days when he inserted the “von” into his plain old name and took his first full length feature, THE ELEMENT OF CRIME to Cannes in 1985. He deservedly won the Technical Prize for the film’s amazing cinematography and the accomplished use of old-fashioned visual effects and colouring. But this was not enough for Trier who was furious not to have won the Palme d’Or and has had a difficult (and highly publicised) bad relationship with Cannes ever since. Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, Trier was the master of old-fashioned (no denigration intended) film techniques and mastered every aspect of the art of cinematography. This was particularly evident in ZENTROPA, sometimes known as EUROPA, EUROPA, released in 1991. Partly filmed in black and white, Zentropa used back screen projection and all sorts of other “lost techniques” to resurrect an ethereal and sinister post-war Germany. Once again, the film won the Cannes Technical Prize, and indeed, the Jury award, but failed to get the Palme d’Or. Trier literally gave the jury the finger.

Perhaps because he was so sick of getting labelled as a technical master, or perhaps because he was just bored, in 1995 Trier got together with some other directors and came up with the DOGME school of film-making. The idea was to strip film of everything but the camera and the actor. No artificial lighting, no artificial sets, to costumes, improvised dialogue, handheld cameras, no special effects. Not a bad plan, but rather than execute it, Trier continued to film his hysterical spoof-thriller/horror TV series, KINGDOM HOSPITAL and went off to make the superb BREAKING THE WAVES. It must have rankled when Trier’s stable-mate, Thomas Vintenberg, beat him to it and released the first and most highly acclaimed Dogme movie, FESTEN, rather stealing Trier’s thunder. The stripped down shooting style perfectly suited this story of a family anniversary party ruined by accusations of incest. This didn’t stop Trier making his own Dogme film – THE IDIOT. This was, in my opinion, less successful than Festen, and once again, as with Breaking the Waves, was nominated for, but did not win, the Palme d’Or.

So is Trier the Martin Scorsese of European cinema? No. By and large, I think the Cannes jury has correctly praised his technical skill, and usually, better films have won the Palme d’Or. Even when Trier’s most complete film BREAKING THE WAVES lost, it was beaten by the marginally better SECRETS AND LIES from Mike Leigh. By contrast, Scorsese always loses the Best Film Oscar to terrible movies viz. the sublime GOODFELLAS losing to the abysmal DANCES WITH WOLVES in 1991. (Cue another essay on why democracy does not work when it comes to adjudicating film awards…)

So, Trier had failed to conquer Cannes with his technical masterpieces and had failed to wow the world with Dogme. So now he decided to produce DANCER IN THE DARK, a lavish musical starring, improbably, Bjork and Catherine Deneuve. The kicker was that this was a thinly disguised critique on the capitalism, the treatment of immigrants in America and the injustice of the American legal system. Now, I absolutely love Dancer in the Dark. I do not agree with all its political points, but I do think that they are made in an intelligent and original way and most of all, they do not overwhelm the emotional heart of the story. I admire Dancer in the Dark a lot, but I also find it entertaining in part, and emotionally involving to the point of tears in others. Finally, Trier had cracked the code, and had won the Cannes Palme d’Or in 2000, beating off stiff competition from another Pantheon movie, Wong Kar Wei’s IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE.

What did Trier do next? He made too of the most polemical diatribes ever seen in a mutliplex – DOGVILLE and now MANDERLAY. Both are filmed in quasi-Dogme style. They are shot in bare studios with no set and few props. Where buildings and cars and trees should be they are marked out with masking tape on the floor. Let’s take DOGVILLE first. Nicole Kidman plays Grace, who has run away from her gangster father and is taken in by the good people of Dogville. It is the Great Depression and times are tough and the villagers soon start abusing Grace as a manual labourer and finally sexually. No doubt Trier meant this to be, as in Dancer in the Dark, an indictment of American capitalism and America’s treatment of immigrants. But to watch Dogville was like being bludgeoned over the head with an over-sized version of the Communist manifesto plated with iron. The acting performances were to be admired, as well as the sheer bloody-mindedness of the technical exercise, but there was little original or interesting in the political message. Let me once again re-iterate that I did not dislike this film because of its anti-capitalist message. I love Dancer in the Dark despite this. And if there were any further proof needed that anti-Americanism is not enough to make a movie good even in France, Trier took the film to Cannes and, for the first time ever, went home completely empty handed.

MANDERLAY has all of the political dogmatism and unsubtlety of DOGVILLE but has fewer decent acting performances to offset this. Notably, Bryce Dallas Howard, taking on the role of Grace, is a pale shadow of Nicole Kidman. This time Trier focuses his attentions of race relations and whether interfering in another regime is justified, and everyone is in the firing line. Grace stumbles on a plantation where slavery is still in effect despite the fact that it is now illegal. Should Grace intervene in affairs, and tell the slaves, indeed force the slaves, to be free? Or should, as the father suggests, they keep their noses out of other people’s business. (American foreign policy, anyone?) Grace intervenes, freeing the slaves and making the white slave owners their servants. At one point she has the former slave owners don “black face” and serve the former slaves supper.

Now, it is laudable to make a film about racial intolerance and whether it can be right to “force people to be free”. But I felt like Trier had nothing new, or powerful or interesting to say about these issues – at least in the first 80 minutes of the film. Worse still, I felt that Trier had none of the restraint shown in DOGVILLE. He was simply being shocking for the sake of it, as if to mask his lack of originality or indeed profundity with cries of horror. And isn’t making actors perform degrading acts without making any original and interesting creative or political statement in itself a form of exploitation? So I walked out. Once again, let me say that I do not object to the themes in Manderlay, or the use of some Dogme techniques, or the use of shocking imagery. I just object to the quality of the creative concept behind them. To my mind, MANDERLAY is a massive miscalculation and as crass and an offensive piece of work as you are likely to see on screen. It hurts to say that because I do admire much of Trier’s early work.

So should you see the movie? No doubt. My judgment is worthless because I could not stomach the full screening and who know what might have happened had I watched the whole movie. So please do go see MANDERLAY, and please tell me what you make of it!

MANDERLAY opened in France and Germany last week. It is scheduled for a limited release in the US on the 3rd February 2006. I’ll update the UK release date when I have it.