Exhilarating Misery at the Movies

I've gone a bit off the grid here lately - holidays, things like that - I tried my hand at NaNoWriMo, sort of - and not written about films in a while. I picked a bad time to stop writing about films - I've done some complaining this year about the quality of the new releases, but the last month or so has seen a very strong run of films. Maybe better than that - I've liked every film I've seen since the middle of October or so, and most of them I've liked very much.

I do have to say - it has been a harrowing stretch of films. The apocalypse seems much on the minds of our best filmmakers. It's been that way all year - Meeks Cutoff might have been the best film before this stretch; Contagion, Page One, even Rango might be considered end of the world films as well. But this fall - a run of films have come out that are quite relentless in their sense of dread. Or, in the case of the Almodovar - that accumulate dread in the corners, shielded by the bright colors and glamourous actors and high melodrama. But it is every inch a horror film as well... Now - there have been some cheerier films this fall - but I am going to put them off for now, stick with the misery...

Melancholia - 13/15 - Antichrist, I thought, made it halfway back for old Lars - this one, though, seems to me to be among his best. You have a simple enough story - 2 parts - first, "Justine" - Kirsten Dunst getting married, a huge party, she and her husband turn up late, and after that the tensions simmer and stew and everything goes to shit. Her boss harangues her about work; her father clowns and snipes at her mother, who interrupts and snipes right back; sister warns her, husband tries to ne nice, brother in law reminds her how much money he's spending, and it all gets worse and worse and poor Justine reacts predictably. In the end, all is lost, as everyone fails her, most abandon her, and she gives as good as she gets.... Part 2, "Claire", is about her sister and the end of the world. Poor Justine is back, catatonic with depression now, and there is a new planet that is going to either circle the earth harmlessly or crash into it and kill everyone - Claire, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, tries to keep it all together, but her sister's madness seems a bit contagious, or maybe she is just the only sane one in the lot, and thus reacts to the end of the world with perfectly rational hysteria.

All this is done in a mix of LVT's trademark nausea inducing camera work and the kind of hyperslow aestheticism of Antichrist. It begins with nearly frozen tableaux of the end of the world as a bad dream - Dunst in her wedding dress in a pond, or walking with huge vines of yarn hanging from her limbs; Gainsbourg carrying her son across a golf course, sinking halfway to her knees with every step. This gives way to the shaky cam of the wedding reception, interrupting this mode from time to time with more of the dreamy tableaux. The shaky cam is particularly shaky - I have to admit, the first time I saw it, I was not in peak form going in, and probably sat too close, and "nausea-inducing" was not a figure of speech... That stuff doesn't usually bother me (It didn't the second time I saw it...), but a larger point might be that it didn't seem particularly well done - I can't imagine Breaking the Waves looking any different - I mentioned the way Antichrist makes you feel the presence of the cameraman - this time, it felt a bit more affected, almost like it was expected in a Lars Von Trier film. But that can't detract from the film's other virtues. The cast is excellent - the second half is a chamber piece, 4 characters in a huge house; the first half a teeming mess, full of first rate performers chewing on their corner of the scenery. John Hurt, Charlotte Rampling, Stellan and Alexander Skarsgard, Udo Kier, Brady Corbett, etc., all stealing the bits they are in.... In the second part, Dunst, Gainsbourg and Kiefer Sutherland play off one another as the world ends, all remarkable. And, shaky cam or not, the imagery is superb - the jumbled chaos of the first half with faces and bodies suddenly picked out of the mess; the dazzling shots of the house and grounds, and the strange new planet in the sky... A lovely and disturbing film.

All of this is, rather obviously, a huge allegory about depression. You could almost say, the first half shows the onset of depression realistically, in a woman's collapse - the second half, allegorically, as the end of the world. Like Antichrist, it makes its metaphors extremely literal - and here seems to be explicitly autobiographical as well. Thinking about it tends to recast von Trier's earlier films - retrospectively, they all seem to be like this one. About a woman who is beset by troubles - the cruelty of the world, an abstraction that is usually manifested in an arbitrary but real external force - a pipe, a dead child, an accident, America... Oddly, maybe because this one is less generically melodramatic, it strikes me as being a bit more self-pitying - the way everyone blames Justine for her breakdown, while they all contribute to it... But that doesn't really diminish it. It is a thrilling piece of filmmaking, which is an odd thing to say about a film about this kind of crushing despair - but there it is.

Take Shelter - 13/15 - Jeff Nichols' second film, starring Michael Shannon as Curtis, who has bad dreams - when they start leading him to dangerous behavior (hallucinating about his dog and his friends attacking him; building an elaborate storm shelter to survive a gas attack), he also checks on his mental health. His mother was afflicted by paranoid szchophrenia from her 30s, just like him.... Nichols plays out the tension to the end, between Curtis's hallucinations as premonitions and as madness - is the end of the world at hand, or is he going mad? It's a fantastic film - Shannon is great - a decent man, tortured, fighting himself, fighting the voices in his head, fighting everyone around him (and trying not to fight them, at the same time). The supporting cast has less to do, but they (Jessica Chastain, Shea Wigham, Kathy Baker, etc.) are excellent as well. All this does play as a kind of allegory of the world as it is, the anxieties of contemporary America - the collapsing economy, leaving all of us on the edge (much of the angst is about money, work, not to mention health care and the environment - it works in all the things we have to be terrified about these days) - but that level of allegory is grounded in a careful and detailed consideration of Curtis's mental breakdown, played with conviction and realism. Complicated, of course, by the fact that his private demons, the terrible storm he foresees, is just about dead right in terms of the catastrophe that is coming for all these people. He may be mad in the literal sense but dead on about the metaphors. All this, I could add, is not very far from what von Trier gave us in Melancholia - a character whose breakdown takes on a kind of universal sign - storm - planet - which consumes the people around them. Both films end in a very similar way - the threat seems to come - it is averted - then, it comes back - and this time, the "sane" characters see it to. It's as if their madness was contagious.... In any case - this is a remarkable and heartbreaking film, every bit as devastating as the von Trier.

Martha Marcy May Marlene - 12/15 - this, while avoiding the end of the world imagery of those other two films, is, like them, a careful examination of the inner world of someone whose inner world is coming apart. Starts with a girl in a farmhouse somewhere in upstate NY, who runs away and lands with her sister and brother in law in a cottage by a lake in Connecticut. Fomr that point on, the film flashes back and forth between the cottage and the girl's life on the farm - we learn, soon enough, that she was part of some kind of cult. At first, a relatively benign looking cult, though with intimations of extreme patriarchy (men eating first), plus mystical/self-sustaining platitudes - as the film goes on, the horrors of the cult escalate - to rape, intimidation, robbery and murder. Cult behaviors are explored - changing names, breaking down identities, creating new ones in the family. Hints of Manson begin benignly (through music, say) but become literal in the end. This is contrasted with the girl's experiences after fleeing, her relationship with her sister and her husband (a soulless and horrible yuppy), and hints of their past, a difficult past. For a long time, the film actually holds these world's in a kind of balance - you can see what drew her to the cult, its sense of real family, its anti-materialism. We see what she is running away from - her brother-in-law's snottinesss, or the way they push her back into drinking, which seems pretty clearly to have been a big part of her problem. When she starts drinking again, she gulps it down like an old friend. The film maintains for a while the notion of these two worlds as equally cruel and bad - though, interestingly, as things get worse with her sister, we see the flashbacks to the things that were truly evil at the cult. All this builds to a masterful final shot that is positively devastating.

The more I think about it, too, the better I think it is. Watching it, it seemed to drag a few times - but in retrospect, I think that is part of the design. It works through her experiences, from the escape, to something else - it is notable that she gets more and more crazy as time goes by - and that the flashbacks get more and more intense. It is as though she starts disassociated (after escaping), and over time, she comes out of her trance - the more she escapes the horrors of the cult, the more she remembers the horrors of the cult, and the more horrifying they become. This film has much the same tone as Take Shelter - a kind of deadly dread, knowing there is nothing you can do, no way for this to end well... Finally - once again, this is a superbly acted movie - Elizabeth Olsen is first rate - John Hawkes is on hand, bringing his sense of homespun decency to a role that has no decency in it - but that strange, emaciated charisma makes the role that much more powerful. Sarah Paulson too is very good.

The Skin I Live In - 12-15 - Almodovar film, starring Antonio Banderas and Elena Anaya as a mad scientist and the woman whose skin he has made... the tale is told all out of order - starts with a woman in a kind of suit, working with fabrics, locked in a room - we meet the doctor who keeps her there - get pieces of the outside of the story - false skin, stronger than real skin, hints of his madness, hints of the woman's resistance to the treatment. Then the maid's son turns up - a crook in a tiger suit - he attacks the woman, rapes her, and the doctor shoots him... That touches off 3 sets of flashbacks - the maid's story about the brothers and the doctor's wife; the doctor's flashback to his daughter's misfortunes; then - another set of flashbacks, to the boy who picked up the daughter at a party, and led to all her troubles - and then to his own. BY this time, the woman with the skin has slept with the doctor - and now we get the whole plot - who the woman is, why she looks like the doctor's wife, why she has been trying to kill herself - the whole shebang. It is, shall we say, a particularly extravagantly absurd plot - but one that bites deep..... It is certainly a first rate bit of filmmaking - Almodovar is a master of the form. It is, in the end, a pure horror film - quintessential horror film - by my pet definition - "the instability of the self - how the self is threatened by forces outside it, that turn out to be somehow inside it - the themes of the Other who is a Double; themes of invasion, especially - loss of bodily integrity, loss of self" - it's about as pure an example as you could ask for. Mad scientists, loss of identity, ghosts in the machine - sexual dysphoria indeed. A very fine film, and one that probably matches all those above in its sense of complete devastation....