"It's okay with me" THE LONG GOODBYE

 A modernist absurd take on the classic Raymond Chandler novel featuring Hollywood private detective Phillip Marlowe. Elliot Gould brings an offhand, shambling grace to a character burned into America’s memory as hard-boiled and in control. Gould’s Marlowe never even attempts control: he’s much too aware of the randomness of fate and the pointlessness of any proactive behavior.

            For Altman, Marlow’s a man of the 1940s trapped in the ‘70’s. Marlowe wears old suits, drives an antique car and holds himself to an outdated moral code. His code includes loyalty, fair play and a refusal to sell out. Any man adhering to such a code, Altman contends, will experience serious problems living and working in modern Los Angeles.

            Alienated yet determined to survive, Marlowe’s mantra is: “It’s okay with me,” by which he separates himself from the grasping of those around him. Marlowe’s anachronistic personality functions as his salvation and as the root cause of his lack of success – the struggle between these personal morality and career striving being a recurring Altman theme.

            More than pace or rhythm, Altman is a master of mood, and his shift from sequence to sequence is usually dependent on one mood ending and another taking hold. This narrative use of mood is enhanced by Leigh Brackett’s sarcastic, but, in its way, utterly sincere screenplay (Brackett contributed to the screenplay of 1946’s Chandler adaptation The Big Sleep). Brackett sees Marlowe and Hollywood through the prism of her thirty years in The Show Business; her nasty humor and unexpected violence give the story its edge.

            The constantly shifting, constantly searching camera mirrors Marlowe’s quest and reveals a shadowy world hidden beneath L.A.’s sunshine. That shadowy universe includes a drunken author, his scheming wife, and a vicious, neurotic gangster played by director Mark Rydell (The Rose, On Golden Pond). Stories held that Rydell took the part to learn how Altman dealt with his actors. Everyone except Marlowe is neurotic in that L. A. Showbiz way; they’re neurotic and proud of it.

            Perennially doomed Noir hero Sterling Hayden, unrecognizable beneath a huge hippie beard and tangled gray mane, plays the doomed writer. Jim Bouton, author of the groundbreaking baseball tell-all Ball Four, plays Marlowe’s absent friend. Nina Van Pallandt – famous in the early ‘70’s for her role in a since-forgotten front-page, high-society scam – is the femme fatale and Arnold Schwarzenegger enjoys his first dramatic role (bodybuilding soft-core aside) as a mob enforcer. Blink and you may miss him.

            A hundred wonderful hidden jokes and references to other films noir run through but never detract from the picture. Among the most subversive is that the film’s theme song plays on whatever music source is close to hand: Gould listens to a jazz rendition on the car radio; when he walks into the grocery store the Muzak version picks up without missing a beat. When Marlowe visits a remote Mexican village, a funeral band marches by blaring the refrain.

            A touching, funny, suspenseful parody of detective movies that is among the best detective movies ever made.

                                    A Girl and A Gun; The Complete Guide to Film Noir

Sterling Hayden and Elliot Gould

Subject Matter

1) Self-delusion and the mechanisms that enforce it; how we announce our own delusions unceasingly and still ignore them; the tenacity with which we cling to the fantasy that no one notices the dissonance between our talk and action; how pissed off we might become if they do.

2) The hard hard road facing anyone determined to live by a moral code; the difficulties facing anyone who will not conform; the punishment due anyone who deals in truth.

3) Payback is a what?

4) Camera movement

 2) Script

            Because Altman encourages his actors to improvise, it’s hard to tell which lines emerged in the heat of the moment and which from the page. Not that it matters; wherever the words derive, they hang together. Screenwriter Leigh Brackett is Hollywood history incarnate. Her credits include The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo, Hatari!, The Rockford Files and The Empire Strikes Back and here, for once, she seems unleashed, able to release her id, her nastiness, her dark side, and still the story rolls along, perfectly structured scene by scene and act by act. No moment, however much it serves as commentary on itself, is wasted as plot-point or narrative advancement. Brackett and Altman, hurling the story into a modern era while emphasizing an existential, crippling self-consciousness that Marlowe never before suffered from on the screen (but which runs through all the books), make sure that character always serves narrative and vice versa. In Noir and thrillers in general, usually one suffers for the other. (The Bourne Identity is a surprisingly good example of narrative fueling character) Their screenplay underscores the character’s issues using modern language and gesture, but never strays from the soul of the source material. In mood, pacing, understanding of the moral struggle, transposition of character and, most importantly, understatement - a critical Chandler attribute - this is the finest adaptation of his work. And let’s not forget Chandler’s sophisticated view of the machinations of society, which tend to disappear in some adaptations. Here, nobody’s trying to make the story dumber. 

3) Images - Composition and Lighting

            Altman’s camera conveys the narrative action and the psychological underpinnings of that action. His camera travels, questing, seeking, never letting us grow comfortable viewing from one position; it’s a Cubist approach, wherein Altman shows us every angle of every moment.

            Do you know how difficult this is for a camera crew? Moving constantly, changing focus every second, letting actors travel as they will and then catching up to them… Think of this film, even more than McCabe & Mrs. Miller, as jazz improvisation, where no matter how far afield the ideas are flung, the melody is never lost.

            Functionally, the constantly moving camera is a metaphor for Marlowe’s quest, his and our confusion, and a reminder that a single mystery underlies this story and we are all looking for its solution. Plus, the motion symbolizes the hopeless moral/personal confusion of every character: their houses are built on sand; there is no safe place to stand, no one clear perspective from which to view the struggle.

Contrast this with the simple stately camera in Lawrence of Arabia, which by its stateliness and god-like omniscience tells us: this is a moral world with clearly defined compass points. Come, observe how this world works and trust this perspective. Altman/Zsigmond say just the opposite: come, here’s total fucking moral anarchy barely perceptible under a truckload of existential dread; let us show it to you the only way we can, from multiple perspectives originating from a godless, answerless, baseless void. 

4) Acting Performances

            Godard said: “Realism isn’t realistic,” he meant that naturalism takes as much work as formalism. You might watch the apparent off-the-cuff natural performances in The Long Goodbye and think they were easier to attain than those in say, Contempt. They ain’t.

            Altman rehearses his actors like a theatre company. He spends, or spent at the time, more time rehearsing than shooting. His actors knew their characters, and their relationships, and each conversation seems remarkably real, including the scenes with amateurs Jim Bouton & Nina Van Pallandt. Here, as in all Altman’s best films, folks behave like folks; they interrupt, talk over one another (something Altman took from the French New Wave and something almost no other American director has ever had the guts to try or the charm to convince his/her actors to attempt), often say the opposite of what they mean and often show the opposite of what they really feel.

 

 It’s my pet theory that Altman’s early films -- M.A.S.H, The Long Goodbye & McCabe & Mrs. Miller -- changed the face of American movie acting. I think he took us from the tortured formalism of Method, and moved us into a new conversationalism. All our stars of a certain age: DeNiro, Sigourney Weaver, William Hurt, Meryl Streep, the guys who came out of Mamet (Mantegna, Macey, etc.) do not respond to screen moments like actors; they respond like normal confused people who often do not know what they feel but always want to appear in control. This is very Altman. Elliot Gould gives the performance of his life.

5) Pace, Cadence and Rhythm

            Because the camera never stops moving, and because the story appears to shamble around - even though it’s quite directed, purposeful and intentional - you might be left with the illusion of randomness. But the story mirrors Marlowe’s perception of the mystery, as Chandler’s books always do. In the beginning, when Marlowe’s baffled, the story moves quickly here, slowly there...as Marlowe’s sense of events grows clearer, the pace becomes more definite. No one thinks of Altman as a structualist  - no one thinks of Godard in that way, either - because his films seem to be driven by emotion. But a careful viewing, or maybe a second viewing, show an artist in total control of his material.

6) Editing

            Again, seemingly random and confusing, but in fact always purposeful. Because the camera never stops moving, the cuts from wide shots to close-ups are especially powerful. As is Altman’s’ habit of letting the lens veer away from the main action as a scene winds down, zooming in to some peripheral but worthy moment, and then editing off that zoom to a whole new scene and another moving camera. The cuts from motion to motion are sublime and grant the film a kind of musical flow.

7) Use of supportive elements: design, costumes, music, etc.

 Nobody American understands mise-en-scene like (early) Altman. The foreground in his best pictures always vanishes into the background, which holds all the clues of class, place, the relationship between the characters in that moment and the ruling emotional gestalt of wherever the scene is set. Altman’s locations – an expensive L.A. nuthatch, a Malibu beach house, a rundown private eye’s apartment – seem so recognizable, so ‘of course that’s the way it would look.’ He achieves this by shooting in real locations, but also by choosing locations that are perfect archetypes of themselves.

            Altman’s a subtle, purposeful costumer; Nina Van Pallandt and Jim Bouton’s leisure clothes are so much more assured that Gould’s ‘40’s suits or the gangster’s slimy polyester. But the differences are never obvious; as with all the other self-delusions on display, everybody thinks they look their best.

            Except Marlowe, who can’t be bothered. 

THE RELENTLESS CAMP VULGARITY OF KEN RUSSELL

 In honor of Ken Russell's passing, here are notes on his style perpared for my cinema studies course "Up Jumped The Devil."

 “He raised funds for Tchaikovsky by telling investors it was ‘a love story between a homosexual and a nymphomaniac’.”     

 David Thomson

 Biographical Dictionary of Film

Elements of a Director’s Style: Ken Russell

 

 THE DEVILS   (1971)

1) Subject Matter: 

The sensual pleasure/terror inherent in just about everything.

How self-destruction grows from ambition, passion, desire, creativity or love.

How love, creativity, passion, desire and ambition fuel self-destruction.

How society undermines the odd, the creative, the independent.

How desire makes women neurotic and men bestial.

Color

Extremes of emotion

History & biography in which facts matter less than drama.

2) Script:

Based on the Aldous Huxley novel The Devils of Loudon, The Devils more or less follows a power struggle between Cardinal Richelieu of France and a roguish priest who serves as governor of the town of Loudon. Richelieu, determined to turn France Catholic by slaughtering anyone who was not, insisted that towns tear down their fortified walls – that towns make themselves more vulnerable. The priest/governor of Loudon refused, but was undone when local nuns accused him of Black Masses, seducing them, etc. The presence of Satan was detected, the Inquisition came to town and bad stuff happened.

Like all Russell scripts, the historical events (the life of Tchaikovsky or Liszt or Mahler or Isadora Duncan) serve as a jumping off point for Russell’s singular ability to exaggerate every human emotion or interaction. You’d think that scenes of nuns masturbating themselves bloody with crucifixes wouldn’t require much exaggeration, but Russell finds a way. Like most of Russell’s scripts, The Devils is too wordy, too self-aware, too full of its own flare. And, like most of his scripts, the story remains compelling. We want to know what’s happening and why, even as we peer through this fog of self-indulgence.

 Given Russell’s juvenile penchant for epatier le bourgeois, he should regard The Devils as his triumph. His detailed depiction of Catholic blasphemy got the film banned in Italy. The two stars – Oliver Reed & Vanessa Redgrave – were threatened with arrest should they ever visit that country.

 3) Images - Composition and Lighting: 

The colors are lurid, the light is too bright and the camera makes bravura moves, which, like all of Russell’s effects, call attention to themselves at the expense of audience involvement in the story. Though Russell understands the grammar of cinema well enough to fuck with it non-stop, it’s as if his eye can’t bear a simple expository shot. Every emotion or narrative point in the frame has to be underlined five times and pointed out to us in neon.

This renders his films hypnotic and exhausting. And leaves an audience feeling messed with as well: sincerity and/or naturalism are not Russell’s modes. That said, Russell knows the power of a close-up and how to structure character through scale and placement within a frame. He’s a good visual storyteller and for better or worse, keeps the narrative – however fractured - moving forward. And, as Pauline Kael said of Godard, Russell turns most viewers into film critics. You can see his technique in front of you constantly, so you start thinking about why he’s doing what he does.

Cinematographer David Watkin shoots The Devils with a combination of late-‘60’s psychedelic expressionism and early ‘30’s Carl Dreyer austerity. His fixed compositions are stately and frightening. His hand-held work, while shooting too close in close-ups and moving all the time, remains unflinching. It’s a beautiful film.

 4) Acting Performances:

Over the top and then some. Sometimes. Think of Tina Turner as The Acid Queen in Tommy. Conversely, think of William Hurt and Blair Brown in Altered States. The former is pure camp, like most of Glenda Jackson’s and Oliver Reed’s performances for Russell. The latter are understated, naturalist and true. Understated, that is, by Russell’s standards. If Altered States is Russell’s most conventionally successful picture, then it naturally features his most conventionally successful performances.

Russell has gotten startling work out of stars whom we do not think of as actors, like Richard Chamberlain, and gotten worthy actors to star it up all over the place, like Vanessa Redgrave in The Devils. Russell’s actors are involved. No one goes about his or her job half-assed. Their performances often feature the exaggerated facial exercises of the silent era.

 5) Pace, Cadence and Rhythm:

 Maddening…Russell will bring the story to a complete halt to indulge in some ludicrous moment that no one cares about save him, or present a scene with such delicate awareness that you want to weep. Mostly, his films lack rhythm or pacing. Scenes lurch into one another, shift season or year without warning, jump-cut across eras or across the dinner table. He knows and understands suspense and how to build it, in his own overly dramatic stylized way. Because The Devils unfolds in one place and in a unified space/time continuum  (unlike, say, the life of Tchaikovsky), Russell sustains a pace that seems suitable to the tale.

No, that is not Warren Zevon.

6) Editing:

Flashy, irritating and very effective. Russell seems to thinks that no one in the audience has ever seen a film before, and will – like primitive tribespeople astonished by mirrors – have their minds blown by cuts to weird close-ups or grand guignol effects that startle nobody. Like his actor’s performances, the redeeming strength of Russell’s cuts is his overwhelming intentionality. He knows he’s going somewhere and wants you to come along. His conventional within-a-scene cutting  -from master to two-shot to close-up and back - is often hackneyed and television-like, as if conversation, even those key to the plot, bores him. If the subject is white-hot passion  - jealousy, lust, impending depravity - Russell cuts with greater ferocity as the characters interact. If the scene is exposition, he can’t be arsed.

 7) Use of supportive elements: design, costumes, music, etc.: 

The English punk/madman director Derek Jarman (Jubilee, The Tempest) served as Production Designer and seems to have modeled his sets after Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. He and Russell did not remake the historical period of the tale. They present a combination of futurism, retro and Expressionism. A hedonist, Russell is infatuated with color and texture and revels in the fabrics and brocades of the historical period.. Russell understands the political hierarchy of decoration within the Church, and he shows how power accrues to those permitted, say, to wear purple. The score is, as always, overdone and intrusive. The Devils showcases sets, costumes and interiors as commentary on the story/characters and as characters on their own.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8Xgm1u_SF4

"CAN'T YOU SPARE ME OVER ANOTHER YEAR?"

THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE                         CRITERION DVD

Victor Sjöström’s Death has a tough gig. He drives the Phantom Carriage – a rotting wooden-wheeled wagon pulled by a decrepit horse - and gathers up dead souls. Death didn’t apply for the job, either. Reflecting perfectly pessimistic Swedish predestination, whomever dies nearest to midnight on New Year’s Eve becomes Death. Death serves, like Miss America, for one calendar year. The following New Year, some other poor dead sucker inherits the cowl and scythe and takes the reins.

 

Of course, Ingmar Bergman pretty much has a lock on the default image that comes to mind when you hear the phrase ‘Death incarnate’: the black-robed, pale-faced, frog-eyed specter who challenges Max Von Sydow to a chess match in The Seventh Seal. His urbane manners and abiding patience make him creepily familiar. He’s one scary, passive-aggressive father figure and no one who sees the film forgets him.

 Swedish cinema titan, technical innovator, director, leading man and cranky bastard Sjöström - Bergman’s idol, mentor, bête noir, occasional father figure and cast regular - knew a thing or two about Death. Embracing his mortal terror, Sjöström adapted Nobel Prize winner Selma Lagerlöf’s novel and cast himself in the lead. Criterion delivers an immaculate print of Sjöström’s 1921 moral melodrama and special effects tour-de-force The Phantom Carriage, which Charlie Chaplin cited as the greatest film ever.

 Unlike Bergman’s archetype, Sjöström’s Death has neither manners nor patience. He’s tetchy and wore out, and little wonder, what with creaking hither and yon 24/7, chucking another soul into the carriage and rattling on to the next. In lesser hands, that would be the tale. But for Sjöström, as for Bergman decades later, Death is a means to an end, a prism through which to view the real story.

 

That story involves drunkenness, the Salvation Army (!), a forbidden love that does not fear Death, a love that lives beyond it, redemption (of course), and some hard-earned self-forgiveness. Yes, it’s a weeper, and should by description be a little ridiculous. But, like D.W. Griffith, Sjöström offered a gift to the future:  the expressive force of his close-ups. The poetry and realism of Sjöström’s compositions - his placement of characters static and in motion – and the power of the faces of his cast create archetypal images of which Death is not even the most memorable. Sjöström had a profoundly modern grasp of what makes inhabited cinematic space. His influence on both Chaplin and Bergman is plain. The emotional truth of his frames overwhelms the melodrama of his plot, most of the time anyway.

 Sjöström plays David Holm, a violent, reprehensible, endearing alcoholic. He had an enormous, mobile, dramatic face, as did all his co-stars. Sadly, no 90-year-old film draws a modern soul completely into the narrative. Much of the fine acting plays at a remove, until one of several wrenching moments crosses the divide of nearly a century. One of the more startling moments features Sjöström, in a drunken, psycho frenzy, bashing through a door with an axe so he can attack his terrified wife. Stanley Kubrick copped this assault chop for chop for chop in The Shining.

 

The Phantom Carriage creates ghosts and their interaction with the living through then groundbreaking special effects utilizing triple and quadruple exposures. They’re among the most evocative of their kind, consistently fascinating, and they help sustain attention during the most melodramatic moments. These see-through figures inhabit the mind well after the movie ends. This has been my experience of most of the great silent films, like Murnau’s Faust; I watch at a distance, never immersed, but later, image after image recurs with surprising clarity.

 Criterion’s DVD extras provide crucial context and history. There’s a lugubrious, revealing interview with Bergman about his relationship with Sjöström (Bergman bugs the hell out of me); a superb essay on Sjöström’s life and career by Peter Mayersberg, the genius who wrote Croupier; and an understated, almost perfectly appropriate score by composer Matti Bye. The score, recorded live at a public screening of Carriage, leaves the melodrama to Sjöström. The sophisticated of the score echoes how unnecessary to the drama – not the melodrama – the spoken word title-cards become. Sjöström was a visual storyteller, and the entire tale is right there in the frames.

KISS ME DEADLY CRITERION DVD

A bull looking for a china shop. Courtesy Criterion ProductionsMike Hammer, as portrayed by Ralph Meeker, is Noir’s ultimate blunt object. For Mike, thinking causes confusion, but action always provides a solution, no matter how destructive. If Mike can’t punch it, break it, drive it, sell it, shoot it or fuck it, he’s not interested; Mike’s a pure American male.

Robert Aldrich’s direction and A.I. Bezzerides’ screenplay transposes Mickey Spillane’s private eye to the screen as brutal, simple-minded, heedless and atavistic, driven by an American’s adolescent fixation with girls, gizmos and guns. Mike enjoys himself, but his antics exact a high price: the end of the world.

Careening home in his sports car one night, Hammer almost mows down a desperate hitchhiker. She’s escaped from a nearby asylum, but not for long. Her pursuers run Mike’s car off the road and leave him to die in the wreckage. Half-conscious, he hears the screaming hitchhiker being tortured to death. With the help of his dedicated - if masochistic - secretary, Vilma, Mike tracks down the killers. Unknown gangsters plant bombs in his car; strange women offer themselves; a sinister secret is somehow contained in a too-warm, glowing, growling leather-bound box: the ‘Great Whatsit’ that everyone kills to attain, and the inspiration for the glowing briefcase in Pulp Fiction. The story tears along. Aldrich distracts us, and Hammer, from his violent quest with cool cars, sharp suits, stellar babes and bachelor-pad oddities, like a primitive reel-to-reel phone answering machine.

Meeker’s character’s an amoral pig, which he freely admits. His contempt for the world is genuine and crippling. His personality makes him unfit for any profession but private eye. That is, he’s lazy, sadistic, likes spying on people and feels morally superior. And in this universe, Hammer’s the hero.

The repellent, charming destructive energy that fuels Hammer is reflected in the world around him. Everyone grabs what they want with no sense of consequences. Because Aldrich, like Hammer, is neither a poet nor a deep thinker  - like Hammer, he’s a hard-ass, if occasionally discursive, problem-solver - Kiss Me is unusually satisfying as both a tough-minded, cautionary sleigh-ride of thrills and a cold-hearted metaphor for the breakdown of society.

With her androgynous haircut, languorous sexuality, little-girl voice and constantly shifting loyalties, GabyGaby at her most lucid. Courtesy Criterion Productions Rodgers provides a fitting coda to fifteen years of duplicitous Noir femmes fatale. She incarnates a singular, dissolute, randomly horny and utterly relaxed ruthlessness. Her identity changes according to the company she keeps, her social role alters as her ambition takes root, her ambitions grow as she learns the extent of her sexual power and her sexual power breeds suicidal megalomania. If Gaby Rodgers herself - Gaby the person, not her character - was in fact neither insane nor distracted to the point of schizophrenia, then her performance is one for the ages.

This is a very different entertainment than the A-picture, Hollywood slickness of Double Indemnity or The Killers.  In most noir, the hero’s loss of innocent is represented as a loss of faith, a calamitous acquiring of cynicism springing from tragic death, broken hearts or dashed expectations. Hammer never had any faith to begin with; he’s just a nasty guy. His comeuppance consists of learning how just how ruthless, brutal, greedy and destructive his enemies can be. And all this time he thought he was the toughest monkey in the urban jungle...

 It’s an alienated, debased portrait, and a visceral prophesy. Robert Aldrich’s nihilism is boundless; he’s determined not only to kill everyone in the story, but also to bring an end to the romanticization of cynicism, violence and self-made morality that comprises Noir. He succeeds as Sam Pecinpah did with The Wild Bunch, by so raising the stakes that no one could possibly follow.

            Criterion’s extras include a short, revealing excerpt from a documentary about screenwriter A. I. Bezzerides, who also wrote Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground. Bezzerides says flat out that the speed with which he wrote the screenplay reflects the depth of his contempt for the novel. Bezzerides chucked Spillane’s ideas and changed everything from the locale to the McGuffin. Director Alex Cox (Repo Man, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), hilariously deadpan as ever, also trashes the book and Spillane’s aggressive simple-mindedness. Spillane – who sold 24 million Mike Hammer books in the early ‘50’s alone - appears in the Bezzerides’ documentary to express his baffled distaste for the film. Unsurprisingly, he has no clue how utterly he’s been outmaneuvered and rendered obsolete. Bezzerides and Aldrich found the themes of Spillane’s novel repulsive, and Kiss Me – shot in 22 days! - is their savage rejoinder. Criterion also includes a self-serving doc on Spillane, who is nothing if not self-serving. After watching considerably more sophisticated men trash him, Spillane’s confidence in his own Neanderthal vision and methods ought to be a little sad. In fact, just like the film, it’s funny as hell.

© 2011 David N Meyer

WHEN WORLD'S COLLIDE; LARS TRIER'S MELANCHOLIA

By Marcus Liberski

I’m a great fan of Lars von Trier’s work. As a Dane, I grew up with his films and media appearances. He is one of the most innovative and groundbreaking directors alive and capable of masterpieces, as he has proven.

The financing for Trier’s films comes from institutional investors across Europe. Contrary to the U.S. system, the European states heavily support the film industry, giving money the filmmakers have no obligation to return and so they never worry about box office numbers.

State financing requires extensive applications. It takes weeks and months to create and compile the necessary material. In the Danish film industry, the myth goes that Trier marks his application with a couple of crosses and his signature and always gets what he asks for. That’s a good indication of Trier’s special status within the Danish and European film industry.

Trier co-created the seminal film company Zentropa, named after the American title of Trier’s first film Europa, as counterweight to the commercially oriented Nordisk Film (Nordic Films), the oldest, still active film production company in the world. With Zentropa, Trier got the freedom he wanted, with no producer trying to control him. The company’s influence shows in the number of great films they have produced, including Thomas Vinterberg’s masterpiece Festen (The Celebration).

Zentropa also launched Pussy Power, which supposedly produced the first porn films for women. Sadly, Zentropa fell victim for the growing New Puritanism that rules the world these days. With a growing number of international co-producers, English investors forced Zentropa to cease their operations in porn. Zentropa recently merged with Nordisk Film.

Maybe these changes reduced Trier’s desire to innovate and experiment. With Melancholia Trier attempts a more commercial, audience-friendly film, although nudity, as always in his pictures, plays a pivotal role. Instead of making a controversial film, Trier, whom Helen Mirren recently described as the film industry’s version of the punk rock movement, created controversy at his press conference at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. After he announced that he understood and felt sympathy for Hitler, the Festival declared Trier persona-non-grata indefinitely – a major blow, since he has been a fixture at the festival for years.The man himself

The first half of Melancholia centers around the main character, Justine’s (Kirsten Dunst) wedding; the second half concerns a giant planet, Melancholia, approaching Earth. We know from the opening sequence that Melancholia will destroy our planet. It’s not clear whether the guests at Justine's wedding are aware of the looming catastrophe.

Deploying tropes that appeared in Antichrist, Melancholia begins with a prologue in slow motion, accompanied by opera. This time the prologue – a long montage – aims for tone and symbolism instead of portraying a traumatic event in a poetic manner, as in Antichrist. Obviously inspired by Kubrick’s opening of Eyes Wide Shut, when Nicole Kidman takes off her underwear and sits on the toilet, Trier opens Melancholia with an extreme close-up of Dunst with greasy hair and no makeup, looking exhausted and very human – deconstructing her glamorous Hollywood image. The montage continues with symbolic images that makes no immediate sense and concludes with Earth being swallowed by Melancholia. While the prologue in Antichrist, shot at 1000 frames per second with the specialized Phantom Camera, was breathtaking and terrifying, Melancholia’s equally gorgeous opening seems flat and farfetched.

Another Trier-trademark is to divide his films into chapters. In Melancholia there are only two. They demarcate the two acts, which feature two different protagonists. Justine stars in the first and her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), in the second. Both actors appear in each other’s chapters as supporting characters. This division provides a deeper understanding of the characters psyche and investigates their differences. Faced with the same challenges, the two sisters react in opposite ways. While Justine embraces the approaching planet and seems to find peace in its mighty, Claire feels only fear. They both react purely emotionally without any rationality – a major theme in the film as their irrationality is juxtaposed with male rationality and belief in science.

A memorable shot of the two sisters observing snow falling on a sunny summer day, perfectly captures female irrationality. The two women watch at the snow, which falls in defiance of all logic, and recognize and appreciate its beauty. In much of his prior work, Trier dealt with the theme of women’s irrationality and their surrender to the will of their emotions versus men’s rationality and belief in science.

The TV-show Riget (The Kingdom), maybe Trier’s most important work, depicts a spiritual world infiltrating the world of science at the best-equipped hospital in Northern Europe, which was built to demonstrate human control over life and death. Only an old woman believes in the spirits, but the doctors – the men of science - ridicule her. In Antichrist, Willem Dafoe believes so strongly in the effect of psychotherapy that he ignores the worrying signals of his wife’s grief. In Melancholia, Claire doubts her husband’s scientific reassurances. She instinctively worries about the approaching planet even though the scientists are certain that Melancholia won’t hit Earth. In these depictions of the differences between men and women lies the momentary greatness of Melancholia. Kiefer Sutherland appears as the uber-rational alpha-male, and where women’s embrace of the irrational seems dangerous and flawed from a rational point of view, Sutherland’s character’s blind belief in science appears even more deadly. This harkens back to Dafoe’s uncritical conviction in Antichrist.

Trier never judges his women characters as they, in a sense, portray him. Trier seems to favor female irrationality over men’s mindless belief in logic and science, which the cataclysm in Melancholia clearly illustrates. Partly because of his identification with his female character, I don’t subscribe to the choir that accuses Trier of misogyny. These accusations are a result of a misinterpretation of the director’s collective work. His attempts to understand the female psyche should be admired. Many male directors through history have failed to even make this attempt.

Trier makes melodrama, and Melancholia is no exception. The extreme family relations seem over the top even for this director. The mother hates the father, who doesn’t care. The sisters seem distant from each other, but Claire’s (Gainsbourg) husband John (Kiefer Sutherland) pays for the extravagant wedding that Justine couldn’t care less about. The characters appear somewhat constructed and caricatured. The writing leaves the actors with a difficult task and the normally magnificent Charlotte Rampling (Swimming Pool) overplays in her portrait of the disillusioned and cynical mother. Surprisingly though, considering the material but not unusual for Trier’s films, most of his cast have never been better. Kirsten Dunst deservedly won the Best Actress award at Cannes for her nuanced and realistic portrayal. Playing the chronically depressed Justine, she captures the mood swings, erratic behavior and blank stares that characterize depression. Trier said that when he lost his intended lead, Penelope Cruz (who chose Pirates of the Caribbean 4 instead), he spoke to Dunst, who confided that she used to suffer from depression. Her experiences shows in the performance.

Gainsbourg, once again, performs as if her life depends on it (Starring in Antichrist, she deservedly won Best Actress at Cannes in 2009). Her complete and utter terror as Melancholia approaches Earth seems real and quite different from the grief-stricken and deranged character she played in Antichrist.

The surprise of the film is an energetic and funny Kiefer Sutherland. In a thankless role as Claire’s wealthy, science-obsessed husband, he gives the character depth. Sutherland dismisses his rational and self-assured rejection of the possibility of a collision between the two planets with an increasing uneasiness. Although Trier wrote the script too fast (6 weeks), his direction of actors appears stronger than ever.

While the performances thrive, the camera suffers. In order to secure the best possible performances, Trier turns to flexible blocking. In Element of Crime and Europa, his camerawork resembles Kubrick’s, but without Kubrick’s gift for carefully planned frames and camera moves. Trier surrendered that kind of control to provide his actors freedom to improvise and experiment. Although his digital images suffer a rendered, computer-like depiction of color, it enables him to keep rolling, and he famously encourages his actors to try different things on each take. This technique compromises the beauty of his frames, which often look messy and unstructured. Using mostly handheld, the new collaboration with DP Manuel Alberto Claro doesn’t work as well as when Trier shoots the film himself. Trier expressed satisfaction with the collaboration after he controversially criticized DP Anthony Dod Mantle’s work on Antichrist. He felt Antichrist was too beautiful and was happier with the disorderly frames of Melancholia. I disagree. The lack of continuity and the jump cuts felt motivated and justified in Antichrist, but seem random and thoughtless in Melancholia.

As opposed to the frames progressing the narrative, the symbolic frames are exquisitely composed and stay with you long after the film ends. The shot of a horse collapsing, or Justine floating down a creek in her wedding dress, are poetic and evoked Trier’s most significant inspiration, the Russian director Andrei Tarkovski. The difference between them is that Tarkovski knew how to be subtle. Trier’s symbolism is heavy and obvious. A perfect illustration is a wide shot of Justine bathing naked and peacefully in the light of the approaching Melancholia. Justine finds peace from her depression in this giant object of doom, and metaphorically makes love to it as she lies at the side of a creek in a stunning shot, surrounded by nature, facing the oncoming planet naked. You won’t find symbolism more pronounced than that…

Trier makes Hollywood movies disguised as art films. His movies are more original, but built on the same structural rules. Melancholia is flawed, but not disappointing. At first I thought it lacked content under its appealing surface, but after thinking and writing about it, I realize that its content incites self-reflection as it entertains. Although somewhat repetitive, Trier’s two latest films show a director far from the artistic crisis that some suggest. Arriving at a new stage in his already impressive career, Trier’s directorial voice still seems strong. His capability to establish a tone amazes. The feeling of melancholia lies heavy over the entire picture in tone, music, color, pace and performance. The choice between melancholia and determinism or fatalism avoids clichés and speaks to Trier’s sense of innovation. Even though we know the end from the beginning, Trier makes sure that it’s worth the wait. And let me just finish by saying: what an end.

 Marcus Liberski, a film director and cinema scholar, is pursuing his Masters Degree in Film Production at the University of Southern California.