Melancholia – Bitch Flicks

Where is the Female Version of ‘Whiplash’?

I’d really like to see more introspective films about the human experience where the humans experiencing things look like me.

Written by Katherine Murray.

I’d really like to see more introspective films about the human experience where the humans experiencing things look like me.

Two weeks ago, I made a special trip downtown to see Whiplash, a movie that is every bit as good as its rave reviews have promised. Whiplash is tense and thoughtful, with skilful pacing and a stunning conclusion, and it asks challenging questions about the human experience. What is achievement? What drives us? What is the value of love and approval?

I absolutely recommend it – but that’s not what I want to talk about, here.

Aside from having an awesome, introspective story that deals in universal human themes, Whiplash has one other prominent feature – 99.9 percent of it is dudes.

The music student and music teacher at the core of the story are dudes, the other people in their band are all dudes, the main supporting character – who is the music student’s father – is a dude. Melissa Benoist is there for about seven minutes, cumulatively, and then the rest of the movie is about men grappling with big, important questions.

There’s nothing wrong with that – and, in popular cinema, there’s also nothing unusual about that – but it did make me wonder: why can’t we have more introspective movies about the human experience where the humans experiencing things are women?

Like, speaking as a woman, I am just as interested in big, existential, philosophical, and psychological questions as men are. I spend just as much time trying to figure them out, and they have just as much relevance to my life – but you wouldn’t really guess that from going to the movies.

Most of the time, when you watch a movie about how A Person should deal with X, the person is a man. To the point that it really stands out, when it’s not.

Gravity, for instance, aside from being a feast for your 3D glasses, is a story about how A Person should deal with loss. And it’s striking because the person is played by Sandra Bullock, and she’s on screen alone for most of the movie, grappling with universal human challenges like how to process grief, and how to find the will to live after experiencing trauma.

A lot of critics have argued that the film would have been better if it had just been about trying to fix a space shuttle without getting blown up, without making it a metaphor for how Sandra Bullock overcomes the loss of her child. It’s the loss and grief story, though, that takes this from being an action movie with a female protagonist – which is rare enough – to being an introspective movie about the human experience with a female protagonist – a genre that might be the rarest of all.

Depending which types of movies you’re analyzing, only 15 to 23 percent of top-grossing films have a female protagonist, despite the fact that women make up half the population. I’m willing to bet that, if we could easily cordon off and analyze the percentage of female protagonists in introspective movies about the human experience, the numbers would be even lower.

You’ve got your female action heroes, and you’ve got your female romantic leads – you’ve even got your female gross-out and/or buddy comedies, now. Occasionally, you even get your female everyman in the shape of Anna Kendrick. But, finding a woman as the stand-in for humanity is like finding a unicorn in a world where horses are already almost extinct.

If you look at this survey of Hollywood movies that came out in 2012, none of the ones with a female lead – except Brave, which is specifically about how there’s more than one acceptable way to be female – seem to be concerned with especially deep questions. This is the same year that brought us Cloud Atlas, Life of Pi, Looper, and ParaNorman – male-led stories with varying levels of introspection that focus on questions of history and human connection, belief, our capacity to learn to care for others, and compassion in the face of fear. Female-led movies in the survey include a couple of horror movies, an instalment in the Twilight franchise, The Hunger Games (which was good, but not that deep), and whatever the hell Snow White and the Huntsman was supposed to be.

Casually searching the internet for lists of existential movies, or movies about what it means to be human also returns a lot of movies about dudes.

That’s not to say that there aren’t deep, introspective movies with female protagonists. It’s just that they’re few and far between.

Slogging through Melancholia is about as fun as slogging through real depression, but it’s an introspective movie about a person who’s grappling with Big Questions concerning depressive realism, and whether pessimism is just good sense. Similarly, Black Swan is (arguably) a movie about a person grappling with identity, and how we reconcile with our shadow selves.

Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain – or, Amélie – is an introspective story about a person who struggles with shyness and how to take risks. And, it works at least as well as The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which is about exactly the same thing, only starring a male protagonist.

So, there are some introspective films about the human experience that feature a female protagonist. But, why do these stories so often default to male?

The first explanation would be that most of the writers, directors, and producers working on movies are men, and therefore they’re more likely to create a male protagonist, because that’s the experience and perspective they’re most familiar and comfortable with.

Fair enough.

Though I hasten to add that Gravity, Melancholia, and Amélie were all written and directed by men, I think it’s valid for a story-teller to gravitate to telling stories about characters of their own gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. In some cases, it can even seem arrogant for story-tellers to presume to speak for people with different life experiences. That’s why it’s important to make room for stories told by people who’ve been underrepresented in media. You know, instead of making it as hard as possible for those people to get in on the action.

The second explanation also goes a long way toward answering the question, “Why does this even matter, Katherine?” and concerns the way that media presents “male” as standard and “female” as a special variation on “male.”

This is feminist criticism 101 and I won’t get into a long discussion of it, but everyone reading this blog understands that we live in a culture where “person” defaults to male a hell of a lot more often than it defaults to female – where being a woman is a marked status that denotes something other than a normal/average/neutral individual. Men and women are so used to seeing men as the default human that it can create a self-perpetuating cycle where writers keep reaching for “a man” when they mean to say “a person,” and the constant presentation of “a person” as “a man” on screen just reinforces that bias.

True story: I’m a woman, and I write things, and unless I specifically stop myself and take stock of what I’m doing, I default to male characters when I just need some random person. This is a thing that happens without malice or even intent, which is why it’s important to bring the pattern to conscious awareness.

Introspective human experience movies are typically more about A Person than they are about an individual with really specific characteristics; there’s a good chance that men are the default just because nobody’s thinking about it that much.

The third explanation, and the one that bums me out the most, is that there may be a perception that women either aren’t interested in or aren’t as capable of answering philosophical questions – something that’s also suggested by the unfortunate pattern where male actors are asked deep questions about the issues raised by their movies, and female actors are asked about their bodies and clothes.

Happily, the solution is the same no matter what the explanation is: we need to balance things out by creating more movies like Gravity, and Melancholia, and Amélie, where the stories are about people grappling with problems that people must face, and the people in question are women.

Just like it’s right that Matthew McConaughey should be able to star in a movie that’s specifically about masculinity (Mud), and a movie that’s about the abstract question of human selflessness (Interstellar), female actors should be able to take the lead in movies that are specifically about women as well as movies that are about people in general – because they represent both of those things.

So, where is the female version of Whiplash? It’s 50 years forward in time, when “person” has an equal chance of meaning “woman.”

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.

‘Nymphomaniac’ Is a Lars von Trier Film That Is Actually a Little Bit Fun

As it turns out, ‘Nymphomaniac: Vol. 1’ is delicately told with both humor and sentimentality. Granted, we are given a rapid sequence of tight close-ups on male genitalia which lasts several minutes, but Gainsbourg’s detached voiceover makes the whole thing feel comical. In fact, we view all the sex acts through Joe’s curious, discerning lens. We’re not just looking at the life of a sex addict, but instead at the intertextual experience of a specific woman who feels she is addicted to sex, but not love. Joe recalls significant moments in her life and analyzes them; in one instance, she wonders why her virginity was taken in a number of thrusts equal to numbers in the Fibonacci sequence.

This guest post by Emily Gaudette previously appeared at Bitch Media and is cross-posted with permission.

In the two weeks before the theatrical release of Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac: Vol 1, I watched every film von Trier has ever written and directed. This included the three hardcore pornographies produced by his company Zentropa. I will neither confirm nor deny whether the porn films are successful in their intent.

Some of von Trier’s films are moody and lyrical (Melancholia, Breaking the Waves), and others are gory and severe (Antichrist). Some are musicals (Dancer in the Dark) and others have a noir aesthetic (Europa trilogy). What binds von Trier’s work together is the sense that he’s just experimenting with different variables. Nymphomaniac’s protagonist Joe—played in the present by Charlotte Gainsbourg and in flashbacks by Stacy Martin—simply throws ideas about her sexual desire against a wall to see if anything sticks. She recounts the events of her life to Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård), an academic who finds her unconscious in the film’s opening sequence. The film doesn’t hammer home a central message on female sexuality or even nymphomania, but I’d wager that we’re better off without films making a monolithic message on female sexuality.

von Trier’s films tend to be more literary and nuanced than most critics will admit. Yes, a woman’s clitoris is sliced off in Antichrist, and yes, I shrieked watching it and had to pull my sweater over my head. But the film is a four-part funeral pyre for a dead child whose parents cannot cope with their guilt. There’s so much more at work in Antichrist than the infamous, bloody pair of garden shears (featured prominently on promotional posters). Selling films like Antichrist as torture porn is a disservice to the full text. It’s true that von Trier is obsessed with dark sex acts; in fact, his explicit images of intercourse in 1998’s The Idiots are cited as the genesis of non-simulated sexual films like Catherine Breillat’s Romance (1999) and Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny (2003). However, the classification of these films as “porn” is questionable, especially since the actual pornography affiliated with von Trier’s company differs in tone from his other films. Sex doesn’t have thematic weight in films like Pink Prison (1999), which German Cosmopolitan calls “the role model for the new porn-generation.” I’m not entirely sure what a porn-generation is, but I’m pretty sure I belong to it now that I’ve seen the Zentropa movies.

But what do we do with images of people entering each other on screen, as they do over and over in Nymphomaniac, if these scenes are not intended to arouse us? von Trier’s intent can feel murky in many of his projects (I still don’t know what Europa was about), but the objectives in Nymphomaniac: Vol 1 feel less complex.

I’d like to identify a gaping disconnect between the actuality of Nymphomaniac: Vol 1 and the way it was marketed. The film’s posters feature each of the film’s stars in mid-orgasm. One might assume looking at them that Nymphomaniac is just about a bunch of white people cumming all over the place. There’s even a poster of Christian Slater, who heartbreakingly plays Joe’s father in flashbacks. To my great relief, he doesn’t play a sexual role in Joe’s life, unless you subscribe to Freudian readings of desire (to which I say, “stop doing that”). Considering Uma Thurman’s role as an emotionally ravaged mother and wife, her poster image (shot from above) isn’t logical, or even helpful. In fact, most of the players in the film don’t engage in sex—their personal issues are too emotionally crippling. This discord in tone is the kind of information I would have appreciated before I walked into the theatre gripping my popcorn carton with anxiety. I assumed I was about to watch a grim, brightly-lit orgy featuring actors like Stellan Skarsgård, with unapologetic shots of penises abounding.

As it turns out, Nymphomaniac: Vol. 1 is delicately told with both humor and sentimentality. Granted, we are given a rapid sequence of tight close-ups on male genitalia which lasts several minutes, but Gainsbourg’s detached voiceover makes the whole thing feel comical. In fact, we view all the sex acts through Joe’s curious, discerning lens. We’re not just looking at the life of a sex addict, but instead at the intertextual experience of a specific woman who feels she is addicted to sex, but not love. Joe recalls significant moments in her life and analyzes them; in one instance, she wonders why her virginity was taken in a number of thrusts equal to numbers in the Fibonacci sequence.

Notably, after Joe has considered the golden ratio as a metaphor for her sex life, she says simply, “it hurt like hell” to signify the end of her analysis on the matter. There is a quiet poetry in what von Trier does with seduction in Nymphomaniac. In one scene, we see Joe fellating a penis, preceded by a beautiful sequence in which Joe perceives men on a train as fish in a river. As each man looks up to regard Joe in her shiny red hotpants, his face is illuminated with overlaid footage of running water and long, rippling weeds.

Interestingly, Joe maintains agency in her sexual experiences almost 100 percent of the time. In one sequence, she has sex with three young men in split-screen and tells each of them that they’ve figured out how to give her an orgasm for the first time in her life. It’s clear that this is not true.

Though the New Yorker calls Nymphomaniac a “joyless sexual tantrum,” there are distinct glimmers of happiness littered through the film. As a child, Joe runs bathwater onto the floor, and she and her best friend B (played later by Sophie Kennedy Clark) pretend to be frogs, sliding back and forth on the wet tile, laughing. Joe closes her eyes intently, clearly enjoying the sensation of rubbing her body against the wet surface, and sunlight streams into the bathroom. There is playful, childlike joy here, and the scene is not filmed in a predatory manner. In fact, when the New Yorker’s Richard Brody writes, “the average male art-house viewer emerges from the first part of Volume I filled with the pleasant idea that there are young women out there—young, pretty, sleek, and determined—who will suck him off in a random train compartment even though he’s forty,” he seems to discount the reaction of more than half the film’s audience. The problem is, the conclusions of art-house dudes aren’t relevant in Nymphomaniac. I’d point to the scene in which a young Jerôme takes Joe’s virginity upon her request, painfully and without concern for her pleasure. Before she hobbles outside, she makes a small adjustment on the motorbike Jerôme is attempting to fix, apparently solving his problem. Later, as adults, Joe and Jerôme argue about a parking space which only Joe is able to get into. Jerôme is visibly frustrated in both scenes, but Joe doesn’t seem to care.

The power in Nymphomaniac has nothing to do with any male character’s reaction to Joe; in fact, we never see any of her partners for more than a few moments on screen, discounting only Jerôme, the man she says she loved. von Trier instead fills the film with weighty female characters like B, Mrs. H, or the other young women in Joe’s sex-without-love cult, which calls itself the “little flock.” I felt genuine joy hearing the little flock’s chant: “mea vulva, mea maxima vulva.” Joe builds her personal, erotic mythology in disregard of any man’s opinion. When she is unable to discount the emotions of male characters in her life because of her connection with them, she reevaluates her ethical framework to fit them in. The film’s whispered refrain seems to haunt Joe: the secret ingredient to sex is love.

I’d argue that Nymphomaniac: Vol 1 is one of von Trier’s most sentimental projects, and I’d point critics to Joe’s meditation on love as an example. She remembers masturbating on a public bus, looking desperately for details on her fellow passengers to remind her of Jerôme. When Jerôme returns to the narrative, pulling Joe to him from above as he does in an earlier scene, Seligman interrupts the flashback and calls the whole situation unbelievable and ridiculous.

“Ask yourself how you’ll get more out of my story,” Joe says. Does Seligman have to believe every part of Joe’s narrative for it to have meaning? Probably not. Do we have to believe her or come to a conclusion about her character? I hope that this isn’t the case, as watching Joe categorize her lovers according to their roles in a polyphonic, sexual spree is enjoyable enough. The film’s interwoven themes of desire and guilt coalesce in its final image, as Rammstein’s “Führe Mich” thunders into the room, the shot cuts to black, and we’re left wondering if Joe’s sex life meant anything philosophical or ethical at all.

Watching Nymphomaniac: Vol. 1 was, weirdly enough, a relief for me, after wading through von Trier’s other works, back to back. It’s certainly the least emotionally exhausting installment in what von Trier calls his “depression trilogy,” which includes Antichrist and Melancholia. Though von Trier’s focus on female characters began in his early work, his attention to detail makes Joe feel more fully realized than his other protagonists. Joe’s femininity is built around her curiosity, and von Trier seems to enjoy watching her experiment with others and fail to achieve emotional intimacy. Though Joe suffers the way von Trier’s other women suffer, she also causes suffering in others, which is a dynamic give-and-take not afforded to characters like Melancholia’s despondent Justine. Most refreshingly, there is more humor in Nymphomaniac than in von Trier’s other work, in its Wes Anderson-style titled chapter structure and the scenes shared by young Joe and Jerôme. in Nymphomaniac, sex remains fodder for von Trier’s dark commentary, but the question of love is a bright spot in his analysis. von Trier seems as transfixed by love as Joe is, and watching both storytellers parse out this confusion is actually fun.

Related Reading: Dark of the Matinee—A Review of Melancholia.

Emily Gaudette is a writer from New Mexico who lives in Boston. She tweets as @genghis_blonde.

Guest Writer Wednesday: Melancholia, Take 2

Justine as Ophelia? from Melancholia (2011)

This is a guest post from Hannah Reck.

“All say, ‘How hard it is that we have to die’—a strange complaint to come from people who have had to live.” –Mark Twain

As a mother of a 3-year-old, I don’t get out much, and, on my evenings off, I’d rather lie on the couch and watch something mindless. Sad, but true. A friend asked me to meet her at the town’s indie film theater and I knew nothing about the film I was going to see, not even the name…or director. I am not well-versed in Lars Von Trier’s work; though, I did try to watch Dancer in the Dark and couldn’t make it through. The film we saw is obviously Melancholia. I’d never even seen a trailer for this film and I left the theater thinking, “how could you ever make a trailer for THAT?!?” Afterward, I watched the official trailer and thought it simplified what was so moving about this film. Yes, it’s about the end of the world, but it’s so much more than that.

Ultimately, Melancholia is about the human condition and how we handle the deep emotion we feel and our personal definition of crisis. The film centers on the relationship between two sisters, who react differently to life’s challenges, and in this case they deal with life’s biggest challenge: death. Not only a single death, but death of everything, which is, I don’t know, kind of heavy. Justine, played brilliantly by Kirsten Dunst, is a near-debilitated depressive who forms a strange relationship to the approaching planet Melancholia. Claire, (Charlotte Gainbourg) is the other sister, very much the antithesis of Justine. For one, she’s sane and copes with life according to the rules of society; employing the niceties by which we all try to abide. Justine doesn’t. Even at her wedding, she rejects the ritual and falls into a deep depression after her mother’s toast. Their mother Gaby, a cutting and steely woman, is played by Charlotte Rampling (always brilliant), and their father Dexter, a bumbling, well-meaning drunk, by John Hurt (sometimes brilliant). Claire, it seems, has helped her sister cope with her depression throughout her entire life. Despite Justine’s episodes, Claire plans an extremely lavish wedding for her sister in the home she shares with her husband (Kiefer Sutherland) and her son, Leo (Cameron Spurr). Their home screams Gothic Romanticism, and could easily be the set of a British period drama with a brooding Byronic hero gazing down from the window. Justine is that hero…Byron-esque heroine?

Justine, Leo, and Claire

Melancholia possesses qualities of romanticism, which Merriam-Webster defines as: a predilection for melancholy, and Wiki describes as “strong emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience [with] emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror and terror and awe—especially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities.” Where Melancholia is concerned, this is an exact description. Though I didn’t grab this Romantic connection immediately, the painting by Casper David Friedrich (most famously associated with Romanticism), Wonderer above the Sea and Fog, reminds me of the film in so many ways. The cinematography possesses the same overcast and pallid blueness that creates the moodiness in Friedrich’s painting. Justine, the main character, is seen looking out onto the vastness of the sea, the glorious grounds and into the infinity that is the sky: the sublime.

Casper David Friedrich’s Wonderer above the Sea and Fog

Melancholia, the planet, is surely sublime. No has before, or will again, experience the super-planet’s awesomeness and the inhabitants of Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia have days to wonder about the vastness of our galaxy and how small we actually are in relation.

Von Trier admits he did not set out to make a Romantic film, but it became one over time. He uses Robert Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde as the haunting theme for the film. When I’ve re-viewed parts of the film the music triggers a physical emotion, because I felt a real connection to the melancholic aspects. Everyone suffers from some degree of depression and I felt an almost-sigh of relief that depression of this magnitude was shown so intimately in a motion picture. I was able to sympathize with Justine’s condition, despite her selfishness. That’s not to say that she isn’t a strange character that could be called crazy. Melancholia takes an almost supernatural turn as Justine becomes Melancholia’s advocate and justifies its course toward earth. “I know things,” she says, “the earth is evil. We don’t need to grieve for it. Nobody will miss it.” Claire is baffled, “How do you know?” “Because, I know things,” Justine says, “And when I say we’re alone, we’re alone. Life is only on earth, and not for long.” It’s a creepy scene, but somehow you believe it without knowing why. Also, she moon-bathes nude (Melancholia-bathes) in a spot just off the property, which is Dunst’s second nude scene. Some people moon-bathe because it’s supposed to revitalize you and give you energy, and Justine’s visit to this spot is the one time she looks truly happy, excited even—I would go as far as sexually excited. Gazing up at the new sight of Melancholia, she softly caresses her skin as though she’s looking into her lover’s eyes and she smiles. Perhaps, she wants to die so badly, that this is the answer to her prayers…?

Claire, distraught, as any person with something to lose, grieves for her son who will never grow up. Though this is the main motivation behind her upset, I found her mothering abilities lacking in their final days. As Melancholia enters their atmosphere on their last day, her son falls asleep because they are losing oxygen. She lays him down in his bed and leaves the room to talk with Justine. As a mother, I found this strange. What if he died? What if he was breathlessly calling for her? It disturbed me. Also, when she finally realizes that Melancholia will indeed hit, she goes to find John, who has taken all the pills she has prepared to softly lull her family into death’s arms. She finds him dead, in their stable, and her reaction is strange. She feels sad (okay) and dwells next to him, almost forgiving what he’s done, and remains there for what seems like an eternity. Yes, it would be upsetting to find your husband dead, but come on—he’s left you (and your child) to meet the end alone. He’s a coward, like most of the men in the film, and this illustrates that Von Trier seems to empathize much more with the women in the film. They are written as the source of power when it really counts.

Pieter Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow

Melancholia is divided into three parts: the introduction, “Justine,” and “Claire.” The intro is a sequence of slow-motion scenes and still images that lasts for 8 (long) minutes, the gist of which is a strange synopsis of the film’s action; however, some of the images never actually play out. The audience sees a dirty, dead-eyed, close-up of Justine in the yard looking into the abyss, while birds fall silently (dead) from the sky. We see her teaching Leo how to sharpen stick with a knife, for the magic cave she’s promised to build. The stills look a bit like she’s teaching him to hunt, which seems connected to Bruegel’s painting, Hunters in the Snow. Not only does this work illustrate the vastness of nature, it shows (like the Romantics) the micro and macro of the landscape (and the hunter’s sticks like the ones they prepare). This image repeats in the film and is the third frame in the opening; first the still painting and then it begins to slowly burn. Pretty sad really, to think of–All. Art. Gone. Every masterpiece, gone in an instant— this, oddly, made me saddest of all. Also in the intro, (never actually seen) Claire in utter panic, running with Leo as her legs sink into the ground. Half of the images are of Justine, Leo and Claire in wedding attire, at the ready, with a grand, gothic estate behind them. Oh, and Melancholia crashing (slowly) into the earth—and it’s truly beautiful.

Claire running with Leo

Justine and Claire could be viewed as one person, because their roles completely reverse by the end of the film, illustrating that we all possess the same characteristics but utilize them at different times. Hate to say it, but (some) depressives are quite good in a crisis. They can put their immediate problems aside and deal with much larger themes (yes, I’m saying me). Justine is a wreck in “Justine,” and Claire appears stable (while John is still alive), but in “Claire,” she falls completely apart and Justine is very strong. Leo calls Justine “Auntie Dealbreaker” in “Justine,” when she keeps wandering off from her wedding reception and breaks her deal with John to smile, be happy, and go through with the wedding she’s promised will make her happy (at the wedding that he’s paying for). Leo calls her “Auntie Steelbreaker” in “Claire” because she’s so tough she could break steel? I think “Justine” demonstrates Justine’s deterioration (possible pre-grieving her death) that is brought on by Melancholia’s relationship to the earth. Though this is (oddly) never discussed in the film, she falls apart as Melancholia begins its “death dance,” and reenergizes when it lines up to hit us directly. Much to John’s chagrin, Claire finds a diagram, on the internet, illustrating the orbital “death dance” Melancholia will take (it comes close, moves away and then comes back and hits).

Melancholia approaches

The men of Melancholia run away and are dismissive of women’s emotion. Justine’s father leaves on her wedding night (even though she begs him to stay); he seemingly cannot deal with her melt-down (and is also self-centered). Her new husband, Michael (played by Alexander Skarsgard), leaves when she won’t consummate their marriage (seemed hasty). Her boss (Stellan Skarsgard, Alexander’s dad, by the way) throws a royal fit when she won’t deliver the tagline he’s forced his nephew, Tim (Brady Corbet), to hound her about all night. She quits her job, as a high-powered ad exec, and (our only moment of true clarity about Justine’s past) pinpoints, with cutting accuracy, why she despises his vapid character and profession. He throws a raucous tantrum (plate-throwing) and leaves. John is completely dismissive of Justine’s feelings/depression (somewhat founded, she is pretty self-absorbed) and his wife’s relentless support; but moreover, he completely trivializes her fear of Melancholia. Instead of facing death with her and admitting he is wrong, he kills himself and leaves his wife and son to suffer a horrible, fiery death. Von Trier wrote these characters, and while he may not have intended for the men to come off as cowardly weaklings, they do.

Finally, here’s my big issue with the film: clarity. Did Von Trier purposefully remain ambiguous? Yeah, probably. Okay, what was Justine like before? She has bridesmaids, but never talks to them. She has a fiancé, who was really excited about marrying her—and they seem really in love, so she can’t have always been this bad. She has a career, as a high-powered ad executive that her boss says, “is the best in the business.” Wouldn’t that require a certain degree of responsibility? I needed more here. How are we to believe that she could hold a job and have friends if she’s a fucking unapologetic wreck all the time? AND—no one remarks that she’s behaving differently—is she worse than normal? Is old Justine at it again…? Yes, on her wedding night her sister says, “we talked about this, no episodes tonight,” but people seem to believe in her. Michael gives the sweetest speech about his love and devotion to making her happy. I’m not being sappy here; his toast to her is a really fine piece of acting.

Overall, a provoking film that forces you to think about the character’s point-of-view. Von Trier is a controversial character himself; he is eccentric and admittedly made this film about his own depression. Possibly fueled by the whole 2012 phenomenon, I’d say he’s made (so far) the most beautiful and compelling film about the end of the world.

Melancholia approaches Earth

Hannah Reck is a professional undergrad who has gained a lot of knowledge in a variety fields: Acting, Musical Theater, Women’s Studies, English, and Secondary education from Ithaca College, CCM and the University of Cincinnati. She’s taken time off to marry, have a baby and a kidney transplant.

Indie Spirit Best International Film Nominee: Melancholia

Melancholia (2011)

This is a guest post from Olivia Bernal.

As I’m leaving the theatre, the booming volume of two planets crashing still causing a hollow echo in my ears, the gentlemen who sat behind me remarks to his wife, “Well, that was…odd.”

“What did you say?” his wife replies, apparently as temporarily deaf as I.

This was the same guy who asked his wife during the beginning collage of the movie – a symphony of images, slow-paced and gorgeously rendered, whose disparate tones fit together like an orchestra – whether the whole movie would be like this and could they leave if it was.

Odd is probably one of the more tame opinions ever bestowed on a Lars von Trier movie. After Antichrist, which gave me nightmares solely from the descriptions, I was hesitant to see Melancholia. I had never seen a Lars von Trier movie and his reputation was one of Nazism, misogyny, and violence.

So I was surprised at this beautiful, thoughtful, and often funny movie. Told in two acts, it begins at Justine’s (Kirsten Dunst) wedding reception, which is held at Justine’s sister Claire’s (Charlotte Gainsbourg) mansion. It is clear early on that Justine suffers from a potentially debilitating depression, one that is being held carefully in check. Claire and her husband care for Justine as a Mother would, constantly fortifying her, usually through guilt, to return to the crowd of people there to celebrate her wedding. As the evening wanes, she escapes time and again to take a bath, have sex with a random guest on the golf course, and cuddle with her nephew, all to the ruination of her new marriage. Her husband, at first patient and understanding, abandons her to her demons by dawn.

Later, as the second act begins, Justine is delivered back to the mansion sometime after her failed wedding. This time, her depression has fully consumed her. She can barely stand, much less eat or walk or bathe. She recuperates as news comes that a rogue planet called Melancholia may collide with Earth – a potential destruction that would cease all life on the planet. In the wake of this potential tragedy, Justine becomes calm – even coherent – at the inevitability of the collision. She comforts her nephew, as her sister and brother-in-law lose themselves in terror. At one point, in the best scene of the movie, Claire stuffs her son into a golf cart and drives madly away from the mansion, as if escaping their isolation could somehow save them. And of course, it can’t. Melancholia looms over their heads, its inevitability a sordid reminder of their impending mortality.

It’s no secret that Lars von Trier manages to produce an excessively offensive quote every time he’s interviewed. Reports that he hired a “Misogyny Consultant” abounded after the release of Antichrist. While being interviewed during the Cannes film festival to promote Melancholia, von Trier announced, “What can I say? I understand Hitler.” I have never seen another Lars von Trier movies and it is difficult to assess someone’s philosophy based on only one of his works or based only on publicity-inducing quotes. But I would argue that von Trier is full of shit. Melancholia is one of the most stunning, understated, and complex depictions of women I have seen in ages.

This is not to say it does not have its flaws. Though the images are unbelievably beautiful, some of the dialogue is terrible. The ideas presented are challenging, but the way in which they are presented is awkward. Towards the end, Justine and Claire confront each other about their varying degrees of concern at the future tragedy.

Justine: All I know is, life on earth is evil.

Claire: Then maybe life somewhere else.

Justine: But there isn’t.

Claire: How do you know?

Justine: Because I know things.

Claire: Oh yes, you always imagined you did.

Justine: I know we’re alone.

Claire: I don’t think you know that at all.

Justine: 678. The bean lottery. Nobody guessed the amount of beans in the bottle.

Claire: No, that’s right.

Justine: But I know. 678.

Claire: Well, perhaps. But what does that prove?

Justine: That I know things. And when I say we’re alone, we’re alone. Life is only on earth and not for long.

The bean lottery, a game at Justine’s wedding, is a silly and ultimately ridiculous way of proving that Justine knows anything. This revelation is supposed to reveal a level of prescience in Justine’s character, a fact that had never been established before. It is the only inconsistency in her character and weakened an otherwise excellent movie. It is then the images, and those big ideas that von Trier is not afraid to take on, that raise this movie to such an exciting level.

If Melancholia is a meditation on the nature of depression, the first act, I believe, is meant to exhibit the self-destruction and eventual depletion of those who suffer from it. Justine’s ruin seemed imminent, even as she smiled and laughed in her white dress and perfectly-coiffed hair. Her father, drunk and addled, remarks upon her happiness, only to have Justine later admit to her new husband that she is not happy at all. Von Trier is so skillful at making his audience despise and empathize with Justine at the same time. You can see the strain on her face as she once again escapes the confines of the crowd and realize the intense effort of her façade, yet you want her to suck it up and be normal. It is the intricacy of this first act, the turmoil within Justine at having to conform that makes her a refreshingly three-dimensional character.

Her mental illness is born in sharp relief to her sister, who is practical and efficient in the first act. The genius of the movie is in the second-act reversal by non-reversal. As Melancholia threatens our planet, Justine loses none of her pessimism, yet now, with death looming, this seems lucid, even logical. What once was absurd about Justine now becomes rational. As Claire becomes desperate to regain control over her world, her competence is now insanity. It is the context that changes – their characters remain frustratingly consistent. Justine’s depression is rational; Claire’s control is fanatical. As an audience member, I almost wanted Justine to admit what she will lose by this tragedy or Claire to stop trying to fix the situation and give in to her destiny.

I believe that in any creation of a character, the portrayal of a character as simple is a worse crime than the portrayal of that character as negative. Honoring the intricacy and spirit and individuality is a greater boon to women than depicting us as good or positive or non-offensive. Justine and Claire are excessively flawed and in many ways are tremendously unlikeable. But, von Trier, ever skillful, will not give in to convention and never gives his audience easy solutions. What he gives us instead, is an intimate view of civilization – of two responses to terror, tragedy, and mental illness. That he does so within the framework of these women, exhibits a level of concern for humanity that his sound bytes from interviews don’t express.

At the end, the earth does end in a deafening explosion of sound as Justine, Claire, and Claire’s son hold hands under a tent of sticks, built by Justine to calm Claire’s son. Justine is placid, almost trance-like; Claire is despondent. This is indeed an odd movie, just as the gentleman said. It is odd because it defies type. Von Trier, for all his bullshit ballyhoo, might have proven himself, perhaps unwittingly, a feminist.

Melancholia trailer:

Olivia Bernal is a public school teacher from Kansas. She writes for The Independent Book Review.