The Weight Of The World

Melancholia(2011)
Directed By Lars Von Trier

Melancholia is the latest film from Lars Von Trier, tagged as an “emotional disaster movie” about two sisters Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsboug, facing internal and external catastrophes. In the first half of the film we watch Dunst sabotage her own idealic wedding as a sudden gloom descends on her like light piercing between clouds, in patches at first until she’s immersed, and the weddings called off. The second half follows the other sister Gainsbourg as a hidden planet is on a crash course with Earth, and her denial, begging, and panic in it’s wake. “If you think I’m afraid of the planet, your too stupid.”, says Dunst in the second half, to a crumbling Gainsbourg. The first half of the film is like “Rachel Getting Married” a lavish wedding party with emotional dead lights slipping through cracks in the opulence. “We have a deal!...The deal is that you be happy.”, says Kiefer Sutherland, as Gainsbourg’s wealthy husband, bitterly footing the bill for in-laws he distrusts and resents. Dunst’s parents are divorced and vocal about it, her mother’s cruel comments to the wedding party contrast against her otherwise hippie free spirit attire. She is against this marriage, and marriage in general, her affable doormat husband is content to smile quietly as she berates him. We get the impression this fight has been going on for years, boiling over anytime the two come into contact with each other. Likewise we come to understand that Dunst’s angst is nothing new, her mother’s speech only serves as a catalyst. “Let’s not have any episodes today?” warns Gainsbourg to Dunst early on. Everyone at the wedding seems to be walking on eggshells, except for her mother who is claimed by her own misery early on, and refuses to leave her room or speak to her daughter. Like the planet Melancholia lurking all along behind a hidden star her soul sapping depression is waiting behind the forced smile Kiefer believes he has paid for with generosity. This relationship plays out another way between Dunst and her boss. Some have suggested Melancholia is a kind of companion piece to “Antichrist”, but that film had at least a promise of comeuppance for Willem Defoe’s smug psycho-therapy, while in "Melancholia" there is no justice, only calamity and “evil”. Dunst claims as much as the final act approaches, “the world is evil…and we're all be better off”.Like Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona” "Melancholia" opens with a dreamlike tableau of images obliquely representing events and images we will later observe, and also involves two women whose personalities slowly merge and their roles of authority and patient reverse. In “Anti-Christ” Gainsbourg lashes out at Defoe and herself, but in "Melancholia" with all encompassing destruction and extinction on it’s way even bitterness wears itself out. Dunst comes alive, so to speak, only as the end is closest and only when her sister and nephew are coming apart. Her, dare I say in a Lars Von Trier film review, compassion for her nephew and sister, comes from their entrance into the world of desperation and despair that Dunst has been occupying for most of the film. She could easily abandon them, but she decides (:SPOILERALERT:) to build a shelter that she has told the boy is magic. To me the construction of the shelter and the final moments are cinematically sublime, with all doom that’s come before, and the very literal death from above crashing down on them, and with Dunst's explicit refusal to sit on the porch with a bottle of wine as Gainsbourg suggest, for Dunst to play along with her nephew in one final illusion is what makes the film truly tragic, and not just fucked up and weird. The image we are left with is a frail shelter of twigs, with human beings holding hands in the center while the world bears down on them, unprotected by the magical belief and faith in the symbol they’ve erected around themselves. But still Dunst goes through with creating the symbol, even in a world where it’s empirically meaningless. I don’t mean to say the film supports the old “no atheists in foxholes” adage, or that the magic cave is just a satirical example of denial of death, Dunst choice to build the cave, is as much for her family whom she like life, loves (her nephew) and hates (her sister) regardless of it’s value as good or evil, because its all that’s still exists. All that’s left is hope, doubt, and innocence holding hands in the end, but it’s Dunt’s hope she’s done one true thing in the cave, the boy’s doubt that the cave will work or mean anything, and the innocence of Gainsbourg’s sobbing, jibbering, terror, if you watch the impact carefully you’ll notice Gainsbourg is the first to let go of the other two. As a rule, the endings of Lars Von Trier films, the final scenes, are usually the most important parts of the film. They radically challenge our views of everything that’s come before, most notably in “Breaking The Waves” and “Dogville”, and "Melancholia" continues with this tradition. Why was the fairy tale wedding ultimately a sham, but the real sham fairy tale enacted in the end scene more real than anything that’s come before? Is shared suffering necessary as a pre-requisite to connecting with other human beings? Think of those characters who hide from each other from the mother in her bedroom, to the father reduced to a goodbye note, to Sutherland’s abrupt exit, to Udo Kier as the wedding planner who won’t look Dunst in the face because “she ruined my wedding”, all of these are connected, twigs along the magic cave to keep Melancholia away.

Is When?

The Future(2011)
Directed By Miranda July

Miranda July has a very singular cinematic style that most people dismiss away as twee or cloying, which to me is a very superficial dismissal, because it gets no deeper than her characters softly eccentric clothing and homemade art projects, and ignores the complex webs of relationships she created in "Me, And You, And Everyone We Know" which continues in her latest film "The Future", but now includes characters that aren't human, and events impossible. The Future is about a couple in their mid-thirties, Sophie (Miranda July) is a children's dance instructor, while Jason (Hamish Linklater) has a job in tech-support that he can do from home on the couch. The two live happily, if uneventfully, in their own world of private jokes, musings, and intimate tangents, the kind that all couples have but that like excessive public displays of affection are rarely observed by those in the outside world. They have decided to adopt a kitten, but a sick one that is scheduled to die in six months, so that it will be not so much a commitment as a few months of charity, and maybe also maybe a dry run to having children. The "c" word never comes up directly, but its visible in nervous glances they exchange when they discover the cat could live another four years. "We'll be forty by then". The kitten in question, named Paw Paw, also serves as a narrator, but one whose perspective is completely limited to his cage, and his imaginings of what life will be like once he is adopted by July and Linklater. Paw Paw is unfailing, undying hope for the future incarnate. He's always been an outside cat, the world of inside sounds like a paradise. So too, do July and Linklater proceed from their cage like apartment to map out their own futures. July convinces Linklater, they are getting older and must seize the day! Seizing the day requires them to quite their jobs, vow to be "sincere" with everyone and in all things, to limit Internet access to one hour a day, and follow their dreams. But what are their dreams? What one of July's points here seems to be is that people often decide to follow their dreams, before they even know what their dreams are. No one is allowed to exist in the present, unless it is in service to the future. Maybe it's better to just sleep soundly next to your loved one than bother with dreams. "It's a widely known fact that dreams are just your brains way of taking a dump at the end of the day."-Stella, "Kaboom" One great scene finds July watching two of her friends, whose lives seem to pass by in seconds, until she's standing in front of their grandchildren. Notice all the trophies on one side in the screen-shot below from said scene.
Linklater isn't sure what his dreams are, he wants to "help the world" but doesn't know how or where to begin. He takes a job with a "non-profit" going door to door trying to get people to buy trees to be planted throughout the city. July tries to do a video-project for YouTube called "30 days, 30 dances", inspired by videos of younger girls dancing in their bedrooms imitating girls from rap videos. Her dances are not as overtly sexual, but slinky, jerky performance art that never seems to get itself started. Linklater's sincerity or guilt for not feeling "more" leads him to buy a drawing on sale at the animal shelter. July's renewed sense of destiny and the significance of everything leads her in a moment of self-doubt, to impulsively to get into contact with the artist, a man named Marshall.
This "yes to everything" attitude, quickly leads to an affair. He puts his hand on her leg, she humps his furniture. Marshall is an older suburban single dad and owner of his own company. Though we never learn too much of his perspective its obvious she is a shot life to him, while he is her chance to be a "kept woman", free of having to decide anything more about the future. Finally a chance, to just "be" and let someone else foot the bill for once. No more worries about rent, career, talent, beauty, or the entropy of such things. "I wish I was prettier. I'm on the verge of being attractive, but I still have to make my case to everyone who looks at me.", July says of herself early on. "Your free now" Marshall tells her during a "Welcome" barbeque as he gestures her in the direction of his daughter.
Meanwhile when Linklater discovers the affair, before he can ask any questions, he manifests an ability to freeze time by placing his hands on July's head. Here the narrative splits in two parallel stories, one of July's new life in the suburbs, and the other of Linklater's in the apartment where time stands still. Linklater begins talking to the moon, which speaks back to him in the voice of an old man that he meet earlier; a man he believed was a sign of he and July's future of growing old together. July's new suburban life is just as dull as her old life, but with no chance of failure or responsibility hanging over her. An old t-shirt of Linklater's seems to be edging its way across town of its own accord, like a creeping memory of the world she left behind. At the same time Marshall's daughter begins to ominously dig a a hole in the backyard, but she wont say for what or why?This all sounds complicated, but when all is said and done, the plot makes sense on an emotional level that never gets buried under the allure of its fantasy elements. "The Future" finds Miranda July stepping into interstitial territory previously synonymous with Woody Allen and Charlie Kaufman; combing personal details ("30 Dances, 30 Days" is a more amateurish version of July's Blond Redhead music video), with a satirical eye for conventional relationships equally open to turns of the dramatic, the neurotic, the deadpan, and the poetic. Quitting your job in the worst recession in decades because your a month away from getting a sick kitten that has made you suddenly aware of your impending adulthood/responsibility/death is just as possible as freezing time with your thoughts, talking to the moon, or stepping out of your life and into your fantasy kept suburban wifedom, because in "The Future" all things are possible. Cats are dreaming of life in your house, but the future is less fresh tuna and flying cars as much recordings of bedroom rump-shaking and trees pining over places to be planted. Maybe its the looming of the future itself, its shadow across the surface of what responsible lives are supposed to resemble that drives these characters from their simple "twee" world of uni-sex haircuts, security blankets and sleepy, snuggly, afternoons, and into ruin, bitterness, and isolation. "When your just starting out...you'll do terrible things to each other"-the old man. But ignoring the future, is no better than blindly saying "yes" to all it, because all decisions have consequences and time can't stand still forever. What begins with all the makings of a typical rom-com story of slackers finding purpose, sidewinds into magic realist study of fears of parenthood/adulthood like "Eraserhead" if he had to work at a build-a-bear in the mall. For all its strangeness, "The Future" has the most realistic endings of any film Ive seen this year. Bitter-sweet is beauty without sentiment, true acceptance of how cosmically wonderous all the minutia of daily life is while never forgetting most of it will be forgotten tomorrow. "The Future" is bittersweet. Your kittens is wounded and waiting.