Melancholia (2011)

The beginning sequence of this film almost took my breath away. It was painstakingly beautiful. The image was just that of a girl with dead birds falling in front of her face, but the emotion was overwhelming. The pathetic fallacy - when real world represents what's inside a person - in my opinion is one of the most powerful tools a filmmaker can use.Tries does this not only through uniquely his very documentary-like camerawork, and lighting that is itself melancholia at times, but in this case, also through playing with time. This scene is again from the beginning, where a woman is walking in a forest with a child in her arms. The mud under her feet goes up to her shins. And maybe this wasn't happening in reality, but the heavy texture of the woman's steps gave me a sense of how difficult every step was. The entire world here was stuck in melancholia. In slow destruction. That was the reality.And then comes the 'reality'. The camerawork dramatically changes, it becomes the classic Trier style handheld, zoom-in, zoom-out camerawork. Very often we see Justin's face as the dominant of the shot, and through great power of emphasizing and acting, we know from the beginning that Justin does not show openly what she feels.The hit of melancholia is inevitable for her, and she does not try to hide it with distractions such as drinking wine, but rather goes toward it face to face, fearlessly.

The term "depression" is thrown around so lightly by some people that it's insulting to those who are going through it. Most think it's when you are feeling down or sad when it's actually much, much worse. It's that feeling of numbness & hopelessness that drains out every good emotion from your life and leaves you an empty shell.And Lars von Trier's second entry in his Depression Trilogy captures that emotional hellhole with startling precision. By far the most accurate depiction of depression I've seen on film, Melancholia is an incredibly polished work from the controversial filmmaker that's elevated to new heights by Kirsten Dunst's career-best performance.The story follows Justine who's struggling to be happy even on her wedding day. Her extravagant reception is paid for by her brother-in-law & sister who ask the bride to hide her debilitating melancholy while trying to keep the guests in line. Meanwhile, a rogue planet has entered the solar system and is hurling towards Earth.Written & directed by Lars von Trier, the film opens with a series of composed shots revealing key elements before main plot surfaces. Justine's arc is handled with care as Trier shows depression for what it is, and makes an interesting argument about depressive people's tendency to act more calmly to catastrophic events. The artsy stuff isn't missing but it doesn't suffocate the narrative by much.Cinematography employs numerous camera techniques to provide varying depth to different scenes but there is a crispness to its images that's evident throughout. The real highlight however is Kirsten Dunst who in the role of Justine delivers a flawless performance that's as convincing as it is memorable. Gainsbourg plays her sister and the bond between them & shift in their psyche is what the film tries to explore.On an overall scale, Melancholia is going to strike a chord with everyone who can relate to Justine and is one of the best films of its year. Its artistic treatment isn't for all plus the deliberately slowed pace will infuriate some but its silent rumination on depression & destruction makes it a satisfying sit for those who can connect with it. Worth your time for Kirsten Dunst's impeccable showcase alone, Melancholia is an arthouse gem.

It's a slow two hours and 15 minutes of film about sadness and isolation. Only people with a tranquil state of mind should ever bother watching this film.An eight-minute montage teaser played in slo-mo serves as a summary for the film itself, all the while being accompanied with the most fitting music, the prelude from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. We are introduced to the three characters whose ultimate destruction we'll get to witness at the end of the film. The breathtaking image of the weary-trodden face of blonde Justine (Kirsten Dunst) with a bunch of birds falling down from the sky, who is later then seen to be wearing a wedding gown running across a forest with vines sprouting from trees dragging and holding on to her. Brunette Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is also seen running but carrying her kid Leo (Cameron Spurr), the golf course they are treading on seemingly have turned into a muddy quicksand, making it difficult for her to run across it. And then interspersed in between were scenes where the planets seem to be floating and waltzing in space, planets barely colliding are made to look like an eerily romantic visual of two planets on the verge of smooching. A definitive WTF moment. Mr. Trier made an Earth doomsday scenario so beautiful to gawk at. (But, hey, wait, I also live in that planet, me thought.) Then the explosive end as the small rogue planet diving into the Earth as if being swallowed. Having witnessed that, I almost stained my boxers.The film is divided in two parts, each focusing on the two sisters, who were seen in the introductory montage. Justine, who over the course of the film is revealed to be a copy writer and have been promoted as an art director by her boss while still at her wedding, and brunette Claire, who happily married to a castle/hotel operator. There are plenty of ways on how to approach and interpret the narrative of the film but what stands out are elements that transcends these interpretations. Whatever which way one chooses to view the film, it would still be a cinematic treat. One is the various characters' way of dealing with the impeding destruction of Earth by the planet Melancholia, this is much more pronounced in Justine's part of the story because the first part for the most part introduced the family at the center of the story. The other is the seeming irrationality of the path which the rogue planet traversing the solar system, that uncertainty just making it freaking worse on their nerves. Such unreliability in the predictions that would want to make people to kill whoever made them in the first place, like John (Kiefer Sutherland), Claire's husband, who reassures his wife at first that because Melancholia has first bypassed Mercury and Venus, and so Earth will be bypassed too, and it would be later revealed that he kind enough to spare others from doing that murderous deed to him. Also, the breathtaking cinematography capturing those visuals, and the gorgeous location that is the representation of opulence. It is worth noting that various reviews have mentioned the film's connection to Jean Genet's play The Maids. The way the story is told at the vantage point of two sisters is the most obvious one but perhaps it is the themes explored there that somehow illustrates and not illustrates the isolation that these two sisters has to go through. Nothing could be more disorientating than seeing two sources of natural light at night time, the moon and the rogue planet at the other side. This could be thought of as an homage to the iconic palace grounds scene in Last Year at Marienabad. But this time, the dual shadows of those very much manicured trees gives that creepy feeling. Pretty insane sight to behold which was enough to drive Justine a bit unhinged as she stares at that bluish-it Melancholia.As the film ends and the rogue planet begins to crash on Earth, the kid's innocence has somehow kind of given him that serenity that helped Leo to easily accepted his fate. Justine, having felt that the world betrayed her and has condemned the world as evil ended up not care much for it's destruction. And Claire is the only one who is tense, having settled in to her upper-crust life and living a fairy tale dream almost and for her to suddenly lose it all, that made it really tough on her, and it is understandable that she is the one who is visibly terrified as they all met their catastrophic end.The virtue of this film is in the simplicity of its vague premise that also imparts a philosophically profound exploration of the mysteries surrounding an arrival of an impending gloom.My rating: A-plus.

Although this one isn't intended to be a "found footage", the effects are the same. The camera shakes wildly all the time, except during the introduction sequence. For some people (me included), this kind of movies could potentially damage their eye sights, and are unwatchable. The MPAA should really do something about this kind of movies, say, by requiring them to give a warning about intentionally shaky cameras.The movie itself is reasonably interesting, although certainly not in the league of the kind of art movies by Tarkovsky/Bergman/…. Unfortunately, I can't finish it for the reason mentioned above. (Tried three times)