Last week Michael had suggested that we watch Lars Von Trier's "Depression" trilogy. In my head I said who the fuck is Lars Von Trier? Out loud I said, sure. I trust Michael's choice in film even though our tastes diverge a lot. He has great knowledge of genres and directors. He consumes information and thinks deeply on most ideas. He is the resident philosopher. He told me the names of the films: Antichrist, Melancholia, and Nymph()mania. Yup, sounded depressing, but I was up for it.
We watched Antichrist first and from the opening I knew I had seen this film before. He was slightly deflated that I had watched it before, but we continued. My viewing of this film originally was not complete as I did not remember the ending at all and there were many images unfamiliar. At best guess I had this film on as background for when I used to fold a paper magazine. It was common for me to put on art films or documentaries as they both have either great dialogue or great music/noise.
Antichrist is by far the gem of the three films. It is dark, poetic, shocking, horrifying, and utterly human in the most raw sense of the word. The film opens with a sequence of the two main characters having savage sexual intercourse. Note: you will see more of Willam Dafoe then you ever bargained for. During this intercourse their small son gets out of his crib and climbs out an open window to catch snow and falls to his death.
The cinematography in this film is impeccable. He uses a mixture of intense dark color, black and white, slow film, and unusual angles to make it all work. If you were to watch this film without the sound it would be visually pleasing enough to not know the conversation. This film is about grief. This film is the deepest, darkest part of grief you could ever imagine. This sort of emotion might be felt at the traumatic loss of a child or a sudden loss of a loved one in which the person suffering the grief has no way to rectify their feelings. It is a darkness you cannot sympathize with until you have felt it.
I understand this grief having suddenly lost my mother earlier this year. Michael understands this grief as his mother committed suicide. Both of our mothers were young and gone too soon. They were suddenly here and then gone. The grief that comes with this sort of loss is dark. It sneaks up on you when you think you have life under control. It distills the world down to a grey, dreary place.
Antichrist gave those feelings inside of me from my mother's death a visual content. In the film however, Charlotte Gainsbourg's character goes beyond what normal grief would consist of. Her character goes to a cold, catatonic then hatefully violent place of destruction against her husband and herself.
If you are faint of heart I would not watch this film, but I would really try. It has immense intensity and truth and profound realization that humanity is fallible.
The next night we watched Melancholia. I had seen this film from start to finish as well. Apparently I am not as skilled as Michael at remembering directors and actors. I am the queen of note pads for this reason. Again, he was a bit disappointed that we weren't experiencing it together for the first time, but onward and upward.
Melancholia starts with classic Von Trier type cinematography loaded with very slow moving film and striking images. What you find out in the end is that you have watched the end of the film at the beginning and then the end is different than you expect when similar images from the start make their reemergence.
This film has dual ideas unraveling at the same time. The main female placed by Kirsten Dunst is a women who is most of the time in the severe grip of clinical depression. When she is not under the veil she is warm and bright and the world loves her deeply. She is a successful business woman from a well off family who is getting married. During her wedding reception we see the depression creep in slowly. Fake smiles, dead eyes, far off stares, and a general heaviness that was not present when you are first introduced to her. We get to watch her unravel.
The second idea in the film is that of global destruction. There is a planet called Melancholia that is to do a "fly by" of the Earth without hitting it and it is to be a spectacular view. The sister, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, has an uneasy feeling that the planet will crash into earth and they will all die. Kirsten Dunst is depression and apathy and Charlotte Gainsbourg is fear and anxiety. These themes have carried over in some ways from Antichrist only softer and slightly more palatable for the general public. There is some nudity in this film though not as much as Antichrist. This film moves slower than Antichrist as well, but still interesting and painful to watch a human unravel into the darkest parts of themselves.
Then there is Nymph()manic (in two parts). Oh man. There was a lot of hype surrounding this film according to Michael. I never heard the hype so it didn't bother me as much as it did him. This film was fairly flat in all senses of the word and if not for the appearance of Charlotte Gainsbourg and the movie sectioned into chapters, I would not have guessed it belonged to Von Trier. It was the most mainstream of the bunch. I could tell it was somewhat of a drudgery for Michael as he was on his phone a lot and appeared bored. I gave it my full attention, but was admittedly bored in several sections and was completely unhappy with the end.
This film is about a woman, who as a small child, realizes that she is a nymphomaniac; she loves sex. The first part of the film is intertwined with the main character as a small girl prior to having sex and her interactions with her father who loved her dearly. The rest of the film is the journey of Joe as she begins her sexual foray into the world. There are boatloads of uncomfortable scenes in this film especially if you are the mother of a teenage daughter. My blood curdled to think my own child would be out hunting men and playing sexual games for a bag of candy.
As a woman ( I am not a feminist by any means) this film disgusted me and maybe that was what Von Trier was going for. I love sex, don't get me wrong, but to watch a woman schedule 10 different men a night to have sex with is a bit much. It goes against my values. This is the key to the film. Joe has no values of morality. She is for the most part self-serving and apathetic. Apathy is the key theme here...deep dark blinding apathy. I would throw fear in there too. Joe seems fearless in her adventures to take men but what she fears most is love. She fucks people. They are objects. The men's desire for her means very little.
There is a hard scene in the film where one her scheduled men wants to be with her long term and she plays him off saying he would never leave his family for her. He does and shows up with bags packed while she is expecting another date. The man's wife follows with his children and creates (if you have morals and feelings) the most uncomfortable environment you can imagine. Joe is nonplussed by this in the least.
In the second part of Nymph()maniac we find a much older Joe lying beat up in an alley. She is found by an old man who takes her to his apartment and gives her tea. She recounts her life to him in a series of chapters that are intertwined with items in this man's apartment. These chapters lead us up to how she arrived in the alley. There are a series of flashbacks woven with the old man's present digressions of her story and how it relates to the titles she has given her chapters. Later in the film we find out the man is a virgin when she confronts that he has not been aroused by her stories which have been explicit. In the end, Joe is tired and tells the man she would like to sleep and states that she feels better and indeed feels like he has been the only friend she has ever had.
The end of the film finds him sneaking back in the room half dressed and trying to have sex with Joe with the basic assumption that she has slept with hundreds of men, why not him? She refuses and under a black screen with sound only, we assume she shoots him. Von Trier spent a glorious amount of time building the character of the old man as something pure and intelligent. He had spent a life time without having had sex with anyone, yet at this moment he would grossly attempt to do it? I found the end to be lazy and ill fitting. I can't say I really enjoyed the pair of films for their content. The sex was gratuitous most of the time and not needed. The second film perpetuated violence against women both provoked and unprovoked. It was a bit heavy on the fetish without any sort of explanation.
I was happy to see all three films together despite the fact that they got more mainstream as they went along. The mind of Lars Von Trier is a dark and dangerous thing. I do believe I would go mad if I lived in it as he often does. If you have the time to stomach one film, I would go with Antichrist every time. It is a brilliant film.
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