Melancholia: bad vibes all over

Birds tumble softly from the ether; a woman gazes at her hands as they give off sparks; a horse collapses to the ground like an old barn; a woman clutching a child sinks deeper into a darkened golf course; a bride sinks into the surface of a stream or trudges through forest only to be snared by roots. All of this unfolds in extremely slow slow-motion, as though some collective will is urging time to a standstill. And you can see why. The end is nigh. Mind you, it’ll take a while to actually get there.

Had I, for whatever reason, had to exit the theatre after the prologue of Melancholia, an astonishing, kind of devastating sequence heavily indebted to more masters of contemporary photo-based art than you could squueze into a year at ICP, set to the romantic bombast of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, I would surely have thought I’d seen the first ten minutes of some rapturous masterpiece. But I stayed, or rather stuck it out, and remembered I was in Lars Land, a place where flights of genius are undermined by lengthy digressions imbued with didacticism, smugness, cynicism and sadomasochistic projections of the author’s disorders onto the opposite sex.

Lars von Trier: maker of some unforgettable images, brilliant conceptualist, shit storyteller. I think I’ve done the image bit, so let’s get to Lars the conceptualist. Melancholia has two parts, two sisters, two disasters. Justine (Kirsten Dunst) shows up two hours later for her insanely lavish wedding reception at a castle. Once she arrives things just get worse: mom (Charlotte Rampling) delivers the most withering wedding speech in history before locking herself in the bathroom and Justine slips ever deeper into debilitating depression. She can barely make it through the night, though disappearing for long spells, telling off her boss and jumping some nervous stranger’s bones seems to help. By dawn, the damage is unrepairable, the marriage still-born. The groom ultimately leaves without her.

After the wedding Claire (Charlotte Rampling) determines to take care of Justine, who’s now verging on catatonic—there’s a painful scene where Claire simply can’t get Justine to step into a hot bath... and that bath looks pretty nice! Claire becomes increasingly preoccupied with the news that a planet called Melancholia has been hiding behind the sun and now seems to be on a collision course with Earth. As apocalypse looms, Claire, quite understandably, becomes hysterical, while Claire's husband (Kiefer Sutherland) turns out to be of no help and Justine is increasingly becalmed and not nice to her at all.

As I summarize all this I realize how much I admire the raw ideas behind Melancholia, the balance of it, that juxtaposition of the individual crisis with the infinite that makes it the nihilist cousin to The Tree of Life. As I think through my experience of Melancholia I have to admit that it was definitely made by someone who really, really gets depression. The problems all come in the way we meander through the story without pace or punctuation, the way we’re meant to bask in the ostensibly clever portraits of one-dimensional or only semi-coherent characters who are mostly just assholes. Everyone, generally, is cruel, though the men tend to be weaklings while the women at least have a certain integrity—and, as with so much von Trier (see Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, et cetera), that integrity is what ensures their doom. So we watch and we wait for von Trier to do whatever it takes to twist his plots into awkward, sometimes plain stupid knots so as to completely screw over his heroine (though Dogville, it must be said, attempted to reverse this somewhat by allowing its heroine a climatic revenge). We worry, we do indeed feel the burgeoning unease, something von Trier is indeed highly skilled at inducing, and we wait. And the waiting can be tedious.

Those summer nights...

Anyone who’s lived in a cold climate knows there are certain rites that seem only to transpire during the summer, and the briefer the summer, the more urgently those rites are conjured. In anticipation of summer, Criterion has released two films on blu-ray that brilliantly examine the sort of bacchanalian follies that accompany the coming season.

Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) was Ingmar Bergman’s first international hit, reuniting Eva Dahlbeck and Gunnar Björnstrand, the nimble, charismatic stars of Bergman’s A Lesson in Love (1954), which like Smiles, is a romantic comedy, a genre Bergman rarely worked in (in the cinema at least) despite his obvious facility. Set in 1901, thus taking just enough historical distance to emphasize how little the nature of romantic entanglements alters with shifts in social mores, the film is indeed very funny. It’s also, more characteristically for Bergman, sexy, poignant, and painful. Smiles on a Summer Night is funny precisely because it’s painful.

Fredrik Egerman (Björnstrand) is an attorney sliding into middle age, attempting to soften the blow by marrying a woman less than half his age. He treasures her more than he desires her. He has photographs taken of her that he admires with the pride of ownership. Or paternity. Fredrik also has a son, roughly the same age as his new bride, who studies theology, broods almost professionally, is agonizingly self-absorbed, and tries to seduce the maid (Harriet Andersson) with lectures on virtue.

Desirée Armfeldt (Dahlbeck) is an actress. Closer in age to Fredrik (Dahlbeck was only 25, but possessed a preternatural, very sensual maturity), she was once his mistress. These days she has a thing going with a married, mustachioed, clownishly egomaniacal military officer, but it seems to have run its course. (One of my favourite lines is spoken in venomous deadpan by the officer’s jealous, deeply tormented wife: “Men are horrible, vain and conceited. And they have hair all over their bodies.”) An unexpected reunion with Fredrik inspires Desirée to hatch a plan that will correct the current flawed romantic geometries. It all goes down in her wealthy mother’s country mansion. Fredrik and his wife and son, the officer and his wife, not to mention their lusty servants, are all invited. The plan involves wine infused with mother’s milk and stallion sperm, a duel, chambers custom designed for facilitating extramarital sex, and at least one attempted suicide. The suicide, incidentally, is a comic highlight.

The characters in Smiles are archetypes of a sort, types that especially recall Chekhov. Like Chekhov, Bergman fills out these types with loving details and idiosyncratic comic exaggerations that his superb cast executes with nuance and efficiency. The result is a film at once delightful and quietly knowing, about age, gender roles, heartache, and the tumult so often left in true passion’s wake.

Fat Girl (2001), perhaps the most perfect work from writer/director/provocateur Catherine Breillat, concerns the sexual initiations experienced by two sisters during summer holiday. The elder, more attractive sister, 15-year-old Elena (Roxanne Mesquida), meets an Italian law student. One night, in a disquieting, transfixing, all-too-recognizable bravura early sequence, he uses his powers of negotiation to shamelessly guilt-trip Elena into anal sex (anal, he promises, doesn’t count). The sisters share a bedroom in the family’s summer cottage, thus the younger, overweight sister, 13-year-old Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux), witnesses the entire transaction. She becomes an absorbing mirror.

Breillat’s camera seems always to be moving, but slowly, not prowling but studying, never intrusive, yet never strictly observational either. Fat Girl, which follows the events of this fateful summer to their abrupt and arresting conclusion, is built upon relatively few episodes, a model of concision, yet every sequence breathes: nothing is rushed. Breillat’s work repeatedly examines female sexual persona in a way that feels almost compulsively subversive, pushing equally against erotic sentimentality, male fantasies and feminist conventions with formal rigour, intellectual confidence and almost always, somehow, a sense of play. There are too many risks being taken in Fat Girl, too much spontaneity and exploration, for it to feel schematic. And I don’t know that Breillat’s ever found anyone who’s embodied her sensibility more acutely than Reboux, who was discovered by Breillat in a McDonald’s. Pretending that two posts in a swimming pool are her fiancé and lover, lifting her nightgown to examine her barely formed breasts and whisper to herself “putain,” letting her sister ostensibly comfort her by shoving a giant toast into her mouth, Reboux gives one of the most remarkable, unaffected and devastating performances of the last decade.

Twisted sisters: Bluebeard on DVD

Does Catherine Breillat instinctively think in pairs? There was something dizzyingly baroque to the catalogue of sexual encounters in her internationally scandalous breakout Romance (1999), while her brilliant follow-up, Fat Girl (01), felt pleasingly chamber-like by comparison. Fat Girl itself became part of a pairing, since that film was soon followed by Sex is Comedy (02), which functioned as a fascinating fictionalized meta-study of the making of a particularly arduous sex scene in its predecessor. Now comes Bluebeard (09) and, while also a period piece, it feels as lean and efficient at 80 minutes as its predecessor The Last Mistress (07) unfurled luxuriously at 115. Breillat’s films possess an unusual balance of incendiary subject matter and elegantly cool and controlled mise en scène. It’s intriguing that the sequencing of her output seems equally calculated for maximum effect. That being said, this effect only functions if people can actually see Breillat’s films. Bluebeard, which is itself another diptych, balancing one narrative within a framing device that proves to be a parallel narrative, arrives on DVD via Strand Home Video without having ever enjoyed a theatrical release in Canada. (It will actually have its Canadian premiere at this week as part of the Cinematheque Ontario's Breillat retrospective.)

The source material for Breillat’s latest is of course the familiar fairy tale first rendered into literature in the 17th century by Charles Perrault, who also delivered the beloved woman-in-peril fables Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Little Red Riding Hood into posterity. Unlike those other stories Bluebeard has failed to find itself repeatedly adapted into movies. The titular serial wife-killer can be found lurking in the DNA of a handful of nasty adult thrillers, but it doesn’t seem very malleable to the tirelessly sanitizing forces of Disney. Yet as an allegory of sexual curiosity and feminine oppression rich in enduringly strange detail it seems tailor-made for Breillat, whose work has brought continual rigour to such themes, sometimes employing scenes of explicit sex, sometimes not. If Breillat’s films are shocking it has more to do with what they imply about the crosscurrents of sex, power and gender than how they push the envelope on anatomical depictions. If you think you’ve got Breillat pegged as a feminist, you should be equally aware of the fact that she’s also labeled herself, quite accurately I think, as a Puritan. Bluebeard suggests that mortal punishment may indeed await young ladies who choose to penetrate the forbidden territories of eros. In fact, the movie makes this suggestion twice!

The dominant half of Bluebeard, set in what appears to be 17th century France, concerns a pair of sisters, the elder Anne (Daphné Baiwir) and the younger Marie-Catherine (Lola Créton), forced to leave their convent when their father’s death leaves their mother financially unable to continue their schooling. They return home, where the furniture is being carted away by debt collectors, mom boils their wardrobes in black, and the dinner menu consists of such humble fare as grass soup—there’s an inspired black comedian behind these scenes, though humour is an aspect of Breillat’s cinema that’s often forgotten. Salvation of a most dreadful kind arrives in the form of a handsome young messenger inviting the bereaved family to a garden party held on the grounds of the wealthy and colossally corpulent Lord Bluebeard (Dominique Thomas). It’s commonly whispered about throughout the county that Bluebeard has murdered each of his wives. The sisters go anyway. Marie-Catherine is fascinated by the seemingly gentle giant, who schools her on the local flora and recalls Cocteau’s Beast more than, say, Joseph Cotton in Shadow of a Doubt. Bluebeard is equally drawn to the wide-eyed, optimistic and barely pubescent Marie-Catherine. She accepts his proposal of marriage. Among the most memorable images in Bluebeard are those of Bluebeard’s immense paw hovering over Marie-Catherine’s tiny hand, and of Marie-Catherine nestled like the tinniest sparrow in the crook of Bluebeard’s elephantine arm. Other memorable images include a trio of paper doll-like corpses suspended from a ceiling, and the arguably gratuitous close-up of a decapitated duck, a phallic spinal stump wriggling from its neck.

The other half of Bluebeard features another pair of sisters, the elder Marie-Anne (Lola Giovannetti) and the younger Catherine (Marilou Lopes-Benites), their costumes placing the period sometime in the middle of the 20th century, making their belated appearance something of a flash-forward. They sneak into the family’s off-limits attic where Catherine finds a book and, much to her sister’s repulsion—though, crucially, not her direct refusal—she begins to read the sordid story of Bluebeard aloud. Between passages they discuss somewhat related matters, including their humorously imaginative notions of what the term “homosexual” means. What’s most interesting in these short, often sinisterly playful scenes isn’t necessarily how they reflect a reading, both literal and analytical, of the movie’s primary text, but how they contribute to a particular idea of sisterhood as a potentially volatile testing ground for the push and pull of adolescent transgression. And it is no surprise that in each case the younger, braver, potentially doomed sister is named after Bluebeard’s writer/director. The original French title of Fat Girl, incidentally, was À ma soeur! You’ve got to wonder just what it would be like to be Catherine Breillat’s sister. The final minutes of Bluebeard make you glad you don’t have first-hand experience.

Here comes the ride: Rachel Getting Married is a careening tour of family collisions

Right off, the timing seems precarious: on the cusp of her big sister’s wedding day, Kym (Anne Hathaway) is picked up from rehab, chain smoking, nervously catty, clearly feeling jinxed by the pressure not to fuck everything up. Emma (Anisa George), the maid of honour, keeps telling Kym that it’s not all about her, and you soon want to swat Emma and tell her it’s not all about brownie points with the bride either. But Kym is self-absorbed, by nature of the 12-step recovery process if not also simply by nature. In her family narrative she has been designated as both the hurricane and its eye. The speech she improvises at the rehearsal dinner keeps swerving so uneasily into colossal public embarrassment without quite tipping over as to be a kind of feat of suspense. The feeling here of being almost out of control is beautifully controlled by Hathaway, by director Jonathan Demme, by cinematographer Declan Quinn, with his stability-crashing handheld camera, and by everyone else in the room for this scene, sitting there trying not to let the panic show. It’s a brilliantly measured early set piece and a sort of emotional weather report on what’s to come.

So we’ve got two sisters, the crazy one and the titular, reasonable one (Rosemarie DeWitt), getting married and getting a PhD in psychology, and leery of being upstaged for the umpteenth time. We’ve got two divorced parents, the outgoing, worrying, slightly manic but clearly loving father (Bill Irwin) and the quietly radiant but finally remote mother (Deborah Winger), the former champing at the bit to welcome Kym home and make nice with everyone, the latter amiable but comfortably outside of the proceedings, as ultimately bottled up as her ex is potentially hysterical. And we’ve got an absent family member, too, a third sibling long dead yet seemingly lingering everywhere they turn—the wedding is to be held in the family house. For everything to be truly resolved by the end of Rachel Getting Married Hathaway would have to no longer be the star, and Winger would have to let go of more backed up vitriol than the movie’s compact timeline and fearsome integrity could probably bear. But tidy resolutions are antithetical to Rachel Getting Married. Women punch each other in the face here, but that's only the start of a conversation to be continued in the future. As written by Jenny Lumet, the abundant humour and familiar narrative devices—I use that adjective in both senses—get us settled into our seats, but the sensitively observed details that bring this story rushing to unruly life are anything but settling.

Hathaway’s Kym seems resentful above all of her own neediness, her large, dark eyes holding an inner turmoil that’s trying to keep up appearances under scrutiny. DeWitt’s Rachel is at once lovely and righteous and eager to descend from her typical stance as moral superior to be the selfish one for once. Her calm is so well-practiced she can barely escape it. The pair's ongoing exchange of roles is the dramatic meat of the story, with Irwin touchingly scrambling to support both at once, and Winger coolly resigned to stand behind the line she’s drawn between her and both daughters. It's a casting coup, to be sure, her hiding nature so perfectly dove-tails into that of Winger the actress and one-time Hollywood siren. 

As for the others, of which there are many, lively supporting players among them, they fall beautifully in line with Demme's rigorous ensemble design. I don’t know whether or not Lumet’s script had Sydney (Tunde Adebimpe of TV on the Radio), Rachel’s fiancé, be a musician, or had the guest list be brimming with countless other wildly diverse and enormously talented musicians, but, if it wasn’t actually his idea, I’ll bet Demme—director of Stop Making Sense and Neil Young: Heart of Gold—felt right at home with this very shrewd conceit. There is no underscoring, instead, diegetic music fills Rachel Getting Married, with everyone from Demme’s guitar playing teenage son to Robyn Hitchcock seemingly always playing or rehearsing somewhere within earshot of the action, creating a stirring, sometimes humorous counterpoint to whatever’s happening. Music gives an aesthetic unity to the story that helps support its necessary loose ends, and when, after a harrowing detour, the party finally starts, the whole movie just surrenders to it, filling up on movement and colour and celebratory gestures. Demme knows we’ve all earned it by that point, the characters and the audience, and the sense of release is tremendous, if fleeting, and always slightly tempered by cutaways to Anne, so well-behaved as to break your heart a little. The next morning comes, a lot has changed, but changes take time to work themselves out, so the note we part on is calmer, bittersweet, and deeply satisfying.

Hymns to the silence: embracing the mysteries of Victor Erice's Spirit of the Beehive

Set in a Castilian village in the years immediately following Franco’s victory and the end of the Spanish Civil War, Víctor Erice’s Spirit of the Beehive (1973) evokes a landscape, flat and vast, creaking and autumnal, in which inhabitants appear to have been driven into hibernation. But in this protracted, quasi-fairy tale sleep begins a richer depth of dreaming. Like Ana (Ana Torrent), the remarkable, dark-eyed, five-year-old girl at the film’s centre, we’re able to explore this landscape, while the political tumult that has scarred it is never mentioned directly. Rather than being merely oblique, Erice shaped his debut film so as to be attuned to Ana’s way of seeing, while the impressions left in the wake of recent events—events that exhaust Ana’s limited understanding of the world—still exist to be read peripherally by the rest of us.

While phasing in and out of Ana’s perception, using both time-lapse dissolves and the overlapping of discordant sounds, both thoughts and images to unify the various elements into a general spectral atmosphere, Erice exhibits a singular sensitivity to subjective experience, emphatically placing value on individual interpretation without being precious about it, or even feeling shackled to any one individual. Potent symbols abound, but their significance is unannounced, or perhaps it is just that it always remains out of reach, except for rare moments such the one in which Ana is asked to place eyes on a two-dimensional figure in front of her class at school: here is an unmistakable  lesson in seeing. By this point in Spirit of the Beehive, Ana and her older sister Isabel (Isabel Tellería) have shared the experience that, over a short period, will radically alter Ana’s relationship to what is seen and not seen.

A truck arrives in their town. It carries in it a dubbed version of James Whale's Frankenstein, which is projected in a makeshift screening room. Films are surely rare spectacles in these parts. And Ana, overwhelmed by the story of the monster and the girl he inadvertently kills, leaves the screening with important questions she can’t answer alone. Before they sleep that same night, Isabel tries to explain the film to her sister in a way that blurs her own ideas of reality and fiction. She tells Ana that the monster is not really dead because movies are fake; however, the monster himself is real and, if he knows you, you can call out to him at night and he will visit. Rather than demystifying the film, Isabel’s complex reading makes the mystery of the artificial man more real for Ana, and soon Ana’s own tactile experience, particularly the things she witnesses at an abandoned farm near the train tracks, will confirm her sister’s testimony.

Adults move through Ana’s world either mutely or speaking in riddles. They have withdrawn from the world to preoccupy themselves with, in the case of Ana’s father Fernando (Fernando Fernán Gómez), beekeeping and nocturnal writing, copying out passages from Maurice Maeterlinck's Life of the Bee; or in that of her mother, Teresa (Teresa Gimpera) writing to an unidentified other who she knows may never actually receive her letters. Ana’s mother’s writing could perhaps be interpreted as a model for Ana’s own private missives: both enact a kind of prayer, sending out messages in spite of the hopeless ambiguity surrounding delivery.

Spirit of the Beehive is a strangely textured, hauntingly beautiful and seductively slippery film of seemingly always fading autumnal light, mirrored images and enveloping enigma. Not unlike The Curse of the Cat People, its insight into child psychology through the examination of traumas that adult eyes never fall upon bridges the magical thinking of early childhood and the melancholy observation of movies that look to the past for knowledge of the present. It’s somehow a fairy tale, a tone poem and a political allegory all at once. In short, its unforgettable, and not to be missed by anyone with a tolerance, much less a desire, for the sublime that lays in the shadows of the inexplicable.