Ides of March (USA, 2011, George Clooney)


Ben Livant:



The West Wing for boys instead of girls.  The erotic soap-opera romantics have been replaced by language-as-a-weapon hard-ball sports.  Ostensibly a no-nonsense examination of politics as a profession in a supposedly democratic system, The Ides of March is at the core yet another bleeding-heart morality tale.  The topic is the loss of innocence and the entrenchment of cynicism due to deal-making and back-stabbing on the campaign trail.


Gone is the optimism of Frank Capra 70 years ago.  The ending of The Ides of March is hardly happy.  Our initially virtuous hero turns out to be an anti-hero, a Machiavellian operator par excellence.  The film is not at all complacent about this.  We are plainly meant to find it tragic that mastering the political machine necessarily entails losing your soul.  Boo-hoo.  What remains is Capraesque liberalism about what the individual is supposed to be able to become in American society if not for the moral decay that attends unchecked and imbalanced power.  Specifically in this story, the drive to gain it.


Oh, the sorrowful saga of what it takes to be endorsed by your delegates to run for the highest office in the land.  The terrible compromises, the undermining of integrity, the corruption of the individual himself and therefore the system.  Will it ever be possible again for a Mr. Deeds to go to Washington and save the republic?  Is there not one person who will stand up to Mephistopheles?  Shucks, if not the guy seeking the nomination, his campaign manager, his right-hand man; you know, to keep the man-who-would-be-king honest to himself, true to the people and good for the country?


The Ides of March boils down to a big breast-beating session within the Democratic caucus.  The brow-furrowing is all about the ravages of in-fighting, the party's self-defeating inability to rehabilitate itself as the proper master of the nation, the current Democratic presidency notwithstanding.  Besides, the movie is based on a play about the candidacy race of Howard Dean back in 2004.  More historical inspiration, the plot requires no small reliance on a tendency Bill Clinton notoriously added to his public portrait.  So much for not making dramatic use of personal sexuality in the manner of The West Wing.  Too bad the status of women in the film is just as unacceptably invisible and inferior as it is in The Social Network, another infatuation with masculine rivalry that doesn't even begin to address how and for whom the system is rigged in the first place.

The cast is packed with talent and the performances are very good.  There is no gratuitious action and the dialogue is crisp.  As I've already alluded, there is a certain melodramatic strain informing the plot, but for the most part it is a lean chess-game that keeps us guessing about the next move.  All in all, an intelligent thiller with its partisan sentiments on full display.  As I am not a huge fan of the genre and definitely not a member of the party, The Ides of March was for me, a boy, only marginally more profound than The West Wing.

The trailer

Shame (UK/USA, 2011, Steve McQueen)

Ben Livant:

If you hadn't seen the films but merely heard a plot synopsis of each, Steve McQueen's current offering, Shame, could easily sound entirely different than his 2008 debut, Hunger. The latter is about an actual person from a relatively recent historical period, a public figure who became so as the result of his involvement in a political action. The former is a fiction in the immediately contemporary setting about an individual grappling with his personal problem, in a fundamentally private way.

Yet, the films have in common a preoccupation with human suffering as it is localized on the concrete materiality of the particular person. Not that there is any shortage of psychological anguish involved. Far from it. But this is phenomenologically grounded in the physical body, be it in pain or supposed pleasure. Both Hunger and Shame examine pathologies that amount to protracted suicide missions.

In Hunger, this self-destructiveness takes the form of a martyr complex on behalf of what the protagonist believes is his purpose in a great social struggle. He does die and his death does, in fact, make a martyr of him. In turn, this makes a massive symbolic contribution to the cause. The substance of the story of Bobby Sands and the ideological complexity of "The Troubles" in Ireland 30 years ago are treated with tremendous sensitivity. (To say nothing of the aesthetic power of the film.) But at the center of the picture is the director's focus on a man starving himself to death, willfully wasting his body away.

In Shame, the protagonist is attempting to fuck himself to death. The extent to which he is doing this willfully is inverse to the extent to which he is unwilling to admit to himself that his compulsive sexual activity is self-destructive. The main dramatic thrust of the film has to do with him - and us - being forced to face this fact. The flip-side of the political protester in Hunger refusing to eat, the carnal maniac in Shame cannot eat enough pussy and all the rest of it. The same coin remains. He is trying to use up his body, exhaust all of its erotic energy, achieve the perfect orgasm that is perfect because it will kill him. (To say nothing of the aesthetic power of the film.)

Perhaps because Hunger is so obviously contextualized in a true story of no trivial historical importance, I am inclined to think that Shame should be subjected to interpretation beyond the experience of the main character to the culture at large. This is, after all, not your run-of-the-mill addiction and it demands special consideration. Junkie for drugs, glutton for food, obsessive gambler - sex addict? No doubt, they exist - although certainly less frequently than other types of addicts - that is not at issue. The difficulty is conceptual insofar as we generally know that enough-is-enough when it comes to drugs, food, gambling - but we tend to feel that nobody is getting enough sex.

To get at this another way, what keeps Shame from being pornography? Is not the character living the cliche male fantasy? Keep in mind that he is not just masturbating in the bathroom, not just watching XXX videos, not just having virtual relations on the internet. He is having actual sex in real life constantly. And not just with prostitutes. Even more, not just with women he must pursue. He is having it also with women who pursue him. And all of his partners are unquestionably attractive. For he is just as unquestionably attractive. He is nothing less than a chick magnet, a true stud, a sex machine whose piston runs all night, every night. For the red-blooded, heterosexual man in the audience, the protagonist doesn't have a problem - he's living the dream!... no?

No. McQueen shows the dream as nightmare. Shame is just too emotionally disturbing to be taken as Puritan propaganda for monogamy, but there can be no doubt that the treadmill of promiscuity is presented as a disease. The sources of the disease are not made clear, however, either internally at the level of the narrative or externally with respect to sociological implications. In my view, it is precisely this ambiguity that elevates Shame from being a voyeuristic sneak-peak at a degenerate to a serious study of a tortured soul in a world of terrible alienation.

We in the audience are depressed looking at this person because we know the world in which he lives is the one in which we too live. All around us, all the time, sex sells everything and everything sold is sexy. It doesn't take too much critical perspective to see that the dominant commercial forces in the culture aim to promote sex addiction in all of us, however cryptically embedded in consumerism, the ultimate addiction. Or not so encoded. That Oil of Olay ad looks good to me point blank.

As I happen to be theoretically inclined, I have been able to identify this sociological implication. A reading internal to the narrative I find more challenging to devise. No back-story is provided to explain the nature of the protagonist's relationship with his sister. The most that can be grasped is that she is just as damaged as he is, just as full of shame, albeit in a different, female way. He wants to push her away. She wants to draw him near. But whatever happened to them (molested as children?) or between them (incest as adolescents?) can only be speculated.

I maintain that such speculation about the siblings' past should be canceled. This forces us to face the fact of his addiction, as well as her own suicidal tendency, with no more insight into all of this than he has; indeed, with less. McQueen robs us of any vantage point that would allow us to judge the character. Yet, it is utterly impossible to identify with him. The ambiguous ending only adds to our discomfort. Hey, I had to watch two episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm right after Shame to get over how icky the film made me feel.

One thing is for sure. If Hunger allowed you to expect more arresting images from McQueen and another totally committed performance from Fassbender, your expectation should have been met by Shame. These artists are making, well, art. Damn affecting art, at that. On this score, I have to register my only reservation with Shame. Too much music, the excellent use of it notwithstanding. As always in cinema, the music tells us how to feel. This is the fail-safe ensuring that even the stupidest guy in the audience does not mistake the film for soft-porn. But with no false modesty I must indicate that I am not the stupidest guy in the audience. Fassbender's face said it all.

Besides, any male hetero-sexist gaze would have got the message when the character expands his sexual universe to include homosexual experience. Here the script is to be commended for its sophistication. It absolutely avoids any homophobic suggestion that this gay encounter represents rock-bottom for the character. The message is that his illness is intensifying such that he will fuck literally anybody.

It becomes not unreasonable to suspect that he will soon enough engage in desperate acts of necrophilia and beastiality. Not out of lust that is perverse. Out of lust that is insatiable as such. Lust that is lost. Lust that has no specific object. Lust that is an empty generality, making the man stick his penis into any hole, giving him no pleasure at all. I reiterate that Shame is not an advertisement for monogamy. Less dismissible, the character is something of a poster boy for celibacy and anti-onanism to boot.

And Dan Jardine:

You've covered much that I wanted to talk about already, so instead of revisiting them, I'm going to focus on a few of the elements of the film that are particularly striking.

Shame shows us writer/director Steve McQueen's continuing fascination with people in bondage. With Hunger, the prison is literal, while in Shame, it is emotional. And while Hunger is clearly the more important film, a potent marriage of cinematic skill and narrative force that is as rare as it is precious, Shame is neither shamed nor diminished by comparison. Shame is more modest in scope and ambition, but the film keeps its aims well within its grasp. Seizing us by the throat from the get-go with an image of torment that resonates and repeats in various forms throughout the remainder of the film, and not releasing its grip until the sharp, agonizing final black out, Shame is as memorable and convincing a portrait of emotional imprisonment as Hunger is of the material one.

The film only offers up the most vague details of its main character's history, and I admit that my need to know the root causes of Brandon's (Fassbender) addiction often led me to exquisite frustration, as McQueen consistently pulled back from providing the sort of detailed back story that would have allowed me to come some conclusions about this character's self-destructive behaviour. This is a daring move on the director's part, as it risks alienating an audience trained to sleuth for psychological clues in the history of its characters. However, McQueen's refusal to connect the dots in our protagonist's past leads us away from the easy answers such a move would provide, and while it is possible in some stories to come to more general conclusions about human behaviour by digging through the particular details of an individual's history, such comforting conclusions evade us in Shame, and the film is much stronger for it. McQueen provides us with clues enough revealing a mysterious but clearly devastating childhood trauma, one shared with his equally and yet completely differently unhinged sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) to satisfy those committed to a morbid emotional post-mortem, without it becoming the sort of catch-all answer that many in the audience may be seeking. This ambiguity and uncertainty force us out of the safe havens that such insights might provide, and back into the film, back into the anguished existence of both the protagonist and his sister.

What McQueen did so exquisitely in Hunger and what he continues to do so well here, is allow us to sit in silence with his characters, in order to absorb their suffering through the potency of his use of sound and image. There are so many moments of mindfulness suffusing the film, filling us with discomfort, confusion, dread and longing, that it feels like a punishment to those I omit to mention any. Still, the scenes on the subway that bookkend the film are worthy of scrutiny, particularly given the extra level of agony added to the sequence by our knowledge of all that has passed before.

Of course Fassbender is well-deserving of all the praise he has received (and the strange sort of honour that accompanies being snubbed for an Oscar nom) but let us not forget the fine work of Carey Mulligan here. Reminscent of an Anglo Michelle Williams, Mulligan likewise pours herself into her roles with great conviction. Here, her lack of self-consciousness is a key element of her complete commitment to her work in this role of a deeply battered and bruised soul.

There is nothing shameful in the fact that Shame is not an accomplishment on the level of Hunger, as I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of films in the last decade that are. Shame is not so much a step backwards as a step sideways, an effort that will probably be judged, after McQueen's long career is put into perspective many years hence, a relatively minor work by a gifted filmmaker.


The trailer

A Personal Journey Through Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise and Before Sunset: Laden With Happiness and Tears

Dan Jardine:

There are many reasons that Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise and Before Sunset demand, like Francis Ford Coppola's masterpiece Godfather I and II, to be addressed as a single unit, but two are predominate. Firstly, doing so allows us to enjoy the invigorating spectacle of the two film’s bold balancing act, as on the one hand there stands the optimism and hopefulness of the (more) conventionally romantic Before Sunrise, while on the other hand, we witness the often savage skewering of same in the much bleaker and despairing sequel. Secondly, the two films are more rewarding when consumed as one because we observe the counter-development of these films’ protagonists, as they effectively switch positions and outlooks over the course of the two stories, all the while maintaining the opposites attract magnetism that drives the romantic genre.

Further, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset are two films that have a deceptively simple concept masking a their depth and grandness of design. What could be more straightforward than placing two attractive, intelligent people together in two gorgeous cultural landmarks, and letting them, to borrow from Hamlet, use their words, words, words to seduce both the audience and each other? And yet, behind this thin façade are two edgy and wise films that I continue to find, a dozen or more viewings down the road, profound in purpose and effect. These two films, which mark director Richard Linklater's crowning achievement as a filmmaker, prove craftily subversive, as the director seduces us with the conventions of a traditional love story, teasing out our expectations, only to undermine them time and again with cynicism and even despair. Sunrise and Sunset coyly employ then cleverly attack the romantic delusions that have been passed down through the ages, and which still have such a firm grip on us, perhaps best exemplified by popular sentiments found in song ("All You Need is Love") and film ("Love Conquers All.") Further, these films ask us to consider the very nature and purpose of our existence in a fragmentary, superficial and transient universe. Amidst some of the most beautiful art and architecture that Europe has to offer, and often accompanied by a soundtrack of history's most enduring composers (Bach, Beethoven, Vivaldi, Strauss), the two leads, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) search for meaning and permanence in a world that emphasizes disposable consumerism. The contrast of the past, and its constant glories with the modern, and its confusion and transience is surely not accidental. In the context of a world where we are only expected to be as happy as our latest acquisition, we share the experiences of the protagonists, who soak up the atmosphere of cultures that have been built over centuries.

Finally, to wrap up this prolonged introduction, I must come clean with a bit of a confessional aside in order to reveal a deeply personal reason that Linklater’s films have, beyond what I hope to show are some impressive aesthetic appeal, held me in their sway. Before Sunrise and Before Sunset have acted as a strange sort of Greek chorus as I have recently been facing down the challenge of enduring the dissolution of a 22 year marriage. Having the two leads in these movies echo my thoughts and reveal my feelings has been both unsettling in a “how did they know that’s how I felt?” way, and comforting in a “so, I’m not the only one who feels this way!” sort of way.

In Before Sunrise, the young twenty-something couple's conversation is preoccupied with death, transience and the fragility of life. I found it both moving and telling that the story that wins Celine over and convinces her to disembark the train and spend the night in Vienna with Jesse revolves around the tale he tells of himself as a child seeing his grandmother's ghost in the spray of a water hose, a fact that we learn in a conversation that also focuses on reincarnation, the fracturing of the individual spirit in the modern world, and Celine's 24/7 obsession with her own mortality. In fact, when the couple first meet, she is reading a George Bataille anthology titled Madame Edwarda, Le Mort (The Dead Man.) Further, the young couple visit the Freidhof de Namenlosen, a graveyard filled with Viennese suicide and plague victims, many of them resting for eternity in the sort of anonymity that had Thomas Gray opining that "Full many a flower is born to blush unseen/ And waste its sweetness on the desert air." And near the film's end, when Jesse quotes for Auden's "As I Walked Out One Evening," he focuses upon the passages that emphasize the inevitability of decline and death ("Time will have its Fancy/To-morrow or To-day"). All the while, the couple search for evidence of things that can persist. Staying awake in defiance of that harbinger of mortality—the night—hoping to cheat the death of each day by stealing the time that they shouldn't even by having together, their conversations inevitably swing back to all the proofs that they see around them of the ephemeral, particularly in the realm of human relationships, where nothing sticks, where disintegration and collapse seem to be the norm. It is not merely in conversation, of course, that they hope to cheat death, but also in their burgeoning relationship. It is standard operating procedure in the romance genre to escape mortality through timeless love. In a daring bit of teasery, Linklater takes this expectation and dangles the hope for a happily ever after ending for the duration of both films.

Immersed in century's old art and architecture, the young couple in Before Sunrise search for meaning and clarity in their conversations, hoping that the connection they are forging will give them something to cling to in this potential shipwreck of life. Yet, it is only in Before Sunset that it is clear these lessons have been truly learned. The Celine and Jesse of this film are so young and unseasoned that they don't realize just how special this connection and their time together is, and it is only after nine years of struggle that they are able to put what they had together in Vienna into its proper perspective. The magnitude and rarity of their Viennese Brief Encounter is only evident through the perspective that the years provide. Also, on the most practical level, Sunset must be seen as a completion of the previous film insofar as the latter film picks up where Sunrise left off. Furthermore, the second film provides high relief for the first, as the Sunset reimagines the themes, moods and conversations of Sunset from a new vantage point nine years hence. Indeed, Sunrise acts much like Sir Walter Raleigh's "Nymph's Reply to the Shephard," a determinedly sceptical poetic response to "The Passionate Shephard to His Love," Christopher Marlowe's self-consciously romantic paeon to pastoral idylls. I contend that the dialectical tension between the styles and outlooks of these two films serves to enhance our appreciation of their depth and significance. Like Godfather I and II, these two films are fulfilling when taken as parts of a whole, rather than as separate entities, and viewing the films in a single sitting a much more rewarding and complete experience of the films.

Before Sunrise appeared on the scene relatively early in the career of director Richard Linklater, and in it he seems content to let his protagonist's words and the beauty of the Viennese cityscape do most of the talking for him. While Robin Wood's seminal essay "Rethinking Romantic Love: Before Sunrise" offers up a spirited defence of a deeper reading of the film's cinematic qualities, using one scene in particular (the imaginary phone calls), to point out how sophisticated Linklater's visual instincts are, the reality is that Before Sunrise consists of a largely static camera, with characters delivering the dialogue in a series of standard two shots, while occasionally breaking the camera away long enough to linger lovingly on the gorgeousness that is Vienna.

However, by the time he filmed Before Sunset, Linklater seems to have developed a little more cinematic ambition. Stylistically, in Sunset, the fluid camerawork distinguishes the film from its more static predecessor, as Linklater glides through the streets of Paris, rarely resting his shots for more than a second or two on the beauty that surrounds his protagonists, delivering the city sidelong glances instead, as the couple, reflecting the increased speed with which time is passing them by, roam the Parisian streets and waterways. The camera seems to recognize that this couple does not have the same luxury of time that they did nine years previous, as even the film's length (75 minutes vs. the 100 minutes of Sunrise) places the characters in the context of even further temporal urgency. Furthermore, the anxiety and restlessness that informs their attitudes and dominates their conversation is well-matched by the film's incessant movement. It is a classic case of the film's style informing and strengthening its content.

And speaking of time, the years that have passed between the two films have not been kind to our heroes. In Before Sunrise, Celine believes in magic, embraces reincarnation, accepts fortune-telling and is enchanted by the words of the street corner poet. In the second film, the bloom is off the rose, as one life appears to be plenty enough for her now. The intervening years seem to have been particularly hard on her, as Celine has developed a hardened, cynical shell that Jesse finds difficult to crack. What was flippancy in Sunrise—her repeated references to how men are lucky that women don't devour them after sex, the way some insects to—has become bleak pessimism in Sunset. She has seen how the world functions, and even though she appears to be committed through her work to make the world a better place, she is not hopeful of its future. For every optimistic note that Jesse tries to strike, Celine finds a discordant one. Her work for environmental causes appears to have developed not out of humanitarian optimism, but rather a finger-in-the-dike pessimism the blame for which, it eventually emerges, is a series of failed relationships the fault for which she finally lays at Jesse's feet. These failures pointedly remind Celine of what a profound and unique experience their night in Vienna was, in much the same way that Before Sunrise reminds us of the creative failure that is the vast majority of mainstream Hollywood romantic comedies. Just as traditional rom-coms encourage an almost delusional level of romantic optimism in their devotees, so too has Celine's Viennese encounter raised her expectations so high, that her feelings of betrayal by her experiences in the years since have been all the greater.

When we first see Jesse in Before Sunrise, he is brash and open, but also freshly wounded by love. Despite winning Celine over with the story of his grandmother's ghost, the younger Jesse is sceptical to the point of cynicism at times, blithely dismissing the inexplicable or the uncertain. However, by contrast to Celine, in Before Sunset, Jesse appears happy enough, married with a child and a modestly successful novel under his belt. There is something more upward-looking in the Jesse of Before Sunset. For example, while he has an irritating habit in Sunrise of contesting nearly all of Celine's thoughts and feelings, in Before Sunset he proves himself far less irritatingly self-involved, and while clearly pessimistic on a personal level, he is much more hopeful in a global sense. It is, one should not, an optimism that grates on Celine. All in all, at first blush, it appears that Jesse has aged well, while Celine has not. But we gradually sense Jesse's deep-seated sorrow as, when the latter movie reaches its climax, we learn that he, for all his apparent hopefulness and optimism in the film's first hour, is the victim of a profound dissatisfaction. Perhaps it is his earlier heartbreak that has led him to seek the safety of a comfortable relationship, but the consequences to his happiness appear to be devastating, as the Jesse of Before Sunset appears to be on the verge of a fundamental psychic disintegration.

Just as Celine's romantic bitterness has been provoked by memories of Vienna, Jesse's impending emotional collapse can be found in the stirring up of old ghosts as well. His lament, as the film nears a close, of the complete lack of passion in his current relationship could be dismissed as the sound of yet another generation settling for a little bit less, but there is something a bit deeper and more fundamentally disturbing happening here. Both Jesse and Celine appear to be on the verge of becoming that German couple squabbling in the train at the beginning of Before Sunrise, and all those middle-aged couples—their anecdotes are rife with stories of parents, grandparents, and friends who have betrayed their commitment to one another--they speak of in Sunrise whose untenable relationships have become a seemingly inevitable tedium of soul-sucking routine. And Celine is forced to face up to the poverty of her love life, and admit to feeling that the magic, romanticism and optimism that guided her thoughts nine years previous had misguided and even betrayed her, feeding into lofty expectations that could not possibly be met by a disaffected and disinterested world. The years of pain and disappointment have led the two lovers to swap philosophical outlooks.

The struggle in these films is no less epic than that of a Greek tragedy between forces of free will and fate. Are our young lovers doomed to fall into the same patterns of disappointment and dissatisfaction that have befallen every generation as it nears middle age? Or are they going to find a way to overcome the great weight that the natural, historical and cultural forces—Time as the oppressor in Auden's poetry, the dissolution of the individual in Seurat's painting, the resurrection of Notre Dame Cathedral, the endurance of the river Seine, the Prater's Wheel of Fortune-esque ferris wheel--that surround these characters and constantly remind them of the crushing inevitability of the passage of time, and which seem to conspire to keep us all in their sway?

The final twenty-five minutes of conversation that winds up Before Sunset are the most deeply affecting moments of the two films. Here, both characters face up to their life's failures, and seem on the brink of falling into a desperate cynicism. Life has come up so far short of the vaulted expectations that the night in Vienna bred in them. However, rather than the disappointment dissolving into a series of recriminations or a spiral of mutual regret, the film takes a miraculous healing turn at the end, and the characters rise above their ruefulness, and use it as a springboard into hope, guarded as it must remain given all that continues to separate them, including geography and pre-existing relationships. As a result, the final moments in Celine's apartment are poignant in a way rarely found in more conventional romances. After spending over three hours watching them connect, and after waiting 9 years to have answered the question on everyones lips-- "will they or won't they?"-- we have become so attached to this couple that it is quite impressive that Before Sunset is able to deliver a conclusion that is not only wholly befitting the couple, who have got so much invested in the lives that they've built apart from one another, yet who clearly need each other to find that faith in life that appears to have left them, but that is among the most eloquent and evocative in filmdom. The carnal union that caps these films is entirely appropriate given the strictures of the romantic genre, but these moments do not come without raising audience concerns. They may be putting off death, both physical and emotional, just a little bit through sex, but is it a temporary reprieve? Ambiguity remains, as we must wonder what reservations and uncertainties lay in store for them the morning after.

Indeed, you would have to be entirely bereft of the proverbial feline curiosity not to wonder where they go from here. Jesse has a son for whom he has sacrificed nearly everything, while Celine's work gives her life a centre and meaning. Are these impediments too great to be scaled? Or will they navigate these global concerns to fine the happiness we all feel they deserve. Linklater leaves this up to the audience, but perhaps we will revisit these characters in the next decade, and learn if the cynics or the romantics have ruled the day. Linklater's two films move us towards a new understanding of the genre of romantic films. While conventional romances spend almost all of their energy convincing the audience that consequences be damned, this particular couple is going to hook up, and it is going to be worth all of our emotional commitment because if they don't hook up, we'll like DIE or something. These films get you thinking about the real nuts and bolts of relationship-building, and more importantly, ask us to confront the consequences on attempting to build relationships in the real world of those illusory and harmful myths that we perpetuate in our romantic fictions. In Before Sunset, Celine's bitterness is rooted in the long shadow that the idealistic romantic fantasy of her one night with Jesse cast on the rest of her life. Her failures with men all come back to their inability to hold a candle to the fantasy that she built around this single Viennese night.

I can only hope that Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke give us all a chance to revisit these films in the near future through the kaleidoscopic viewfinder of a third entry in the series. I would love another chance to check in with these characters, to see how their futures have telescoped together (or apart), and more importantly, to weigh whether the films still have as profound a personal effect upon me as they currently do. To wrap things up, I will take one final glimpse of the two film's cinematic suggestiveness. There are many memorable conversations in these two films, but as images go, few can top in significance the shot in Before Sunrise of two trains forging their way through the Viennese night. Both move swiftly and in the same direction, but the do not share the same track. They run along on parallel tracks until, just as the camera parts ways with the trains, the trajectories of two trains diverge, one moving up, the other down. As symbols go, this representation of the future of our two leads, and the future of most relationships, is fitting. I will take advantage of the train's metaphorical aptness as a keen indicator that it is time to step off of the tracks and take my leave.

Melancholia  (Denmark, 2011, Lars von Trier)

Then Ben:

Just as NHL addicts love to pick and choose from the whole league to create their dream team, film buffs make Top Ten lists.  And just like a hockey fan who wants to see nothing more than a show-down between his best goalie and his favorite forward, cinema enthusiasts enjoy programing the ultimate double-bill.

 I rarely read reviews so I really do have to ask:  Is it just me or has everybody else also observed that this film paired against Terrence Malick's latest is the ultimate double-bill this year?  Come on!  Is this not a match made in heaven (or hell, however you want to conceive of it), a fight to the death (or the after-life), a contest between the eternal light of God's grace and the black hole of nothingness?

Both films deliver outstandingly arresting visuals that establish inescapably affecting atmospheres that speak to the human condition.  And the two films are (almost) equally pretentious.  They find it in every way legitimate to fill up a massive metaphysical frame with the paint of personal psychology.  In the shoot-out between The Tree of Life and Melancholia, however, I am inclined to cheer for the latter.  My reasons are three.

In the first philosophic place, my supposedly supernatural soul about which believers are so optimistic is just too supposed for me to take optimistically.  You know.  Death and taxes.  In that order.  Couple things you can count on.  Death of me, death of you, death of the planet...eventually.  Can't avoid the void.  The first rule of the realist.

 

Secondly, I respectfully request a splash of irony from all painters on the cosmic canvas. Von Trier's picture is somewhat ironic, whereas Malick's painting is dead serious (not-dead serious, that is, angels-forever serious).  This is not to suggest that Melancholia has a sense of humour.  It is just as un-funny as The Tree of Life.  My point is that von Trier's film is somewhat less pretentious because the depiction of the end of the world is less literal event and more metaphoric device than the opening of the pearly gates in Malick's movie.

 (On the other hand, maybe von Trier does crack what he considers to be a joke.  Many scenes in Melancholia are precisely paced, choreographed, to the Prelude of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde.  This is THE Romantic work of art that functioned as the point of mediation between Schopenhauer and [yes, I'm reading him right now, having just finished my course in] Nietzsche.  The emotional power of the music is repetitively borrowed by the film almost to the point of being camp.  Yet, the parallels that may be drawn between the so-opposite sisters in the film and the antithetical conceptions in  Wagner's tragic opera of day/life/illusion and night/death/actuality are there for the drawing.  About this, I believe von Trier is sincere.  And, duh, he sides with night/death/actuality unto nihilistic despair.  [Unlike Wagner who also sides with this but on behalf of erotic pathos.] )

My final reason for my preference is positively prosaic, which is to say that I am positive about prose that makes some goddamn sense.  The narrative in The Tree of Life is incoherent.  I suspect that it is intended to be poetic and I am confident that it is meant to be profound, but it's an ineffectual parable as far as I can make out that attempts to pass off inept drama as a glorious aesthetic experience.  Melancholia, conversely, is one hell of a two act play.  Not only did it make perfect sense as a story, the formal construction of the narrative is remarkably powerful.

Much of this resides in the control of our cognition von Trier achieves by telling us the ending at the beginning.  But the radical stylistic juxtaposition of the two acts is equally important.  It facilitates the inversion of the binary represented by the sisters.  They effectively switch places with respect to our sympathies and in so doing validate von Trier's attitude that existence is just so much non-existence.  Correction.  His take is more explicitly negative.  The sister that is his stand-in says not just that life on earth is the only life in the universe.  She declares further that life on earth is evil.

According to what moral compass this orientation is charted, I notice von Trier declines to disclose.  What is plain is that this is no "disaster movie" since the end of the world can hardly be considered a disaster if life on earth is evil.  Guess we just have to accept the opinion of a clinically depressive film-maker as reliable testimony on this topic.  Or not.  Personally, I have put meatloaf in my mouth many, many times and not once has it tasted to me like ashes.  But I would be a liar if I failed to confess that Melancholia made me wake up in the middle of the night, unable to fall back asleep.  It's a very intense trip, the artistic authority of which cannot be denied.  I think it is an excellent film.

I propose we adopt the notion that von Trier has become - if he wasn't already - a master of horror.  In support of this campaign, I hope I will be forgiven for quoting at length from my review of his Antichrist:

It's title notwithstanding, there is no moral reference point - period.  Call me a prude but I have to side with the Sunday school types who would no doubt label it degenerate.  I prefer the term decadent because for me it suggests a less individualistic, more general sociological decay.  At some point, it behooves us to wonder what a work of art is reflecting about the culture at large, and this film is universal nihilism posing as a piece of personal psychosis.  The nasty supernatural trappings are just that; pretentious window dressing, just the stuff to fool lots of reviewers into thinking the film is philosophically assertive.  But given all the rest of the uber-grizzly fare, some of the supposedly occult implications about the natural world were sorta goofy; not full-out funny, but dorky nonetheless and therefore laughable.  The ending is a head-scratcher, to be sure. But so what?  We've been too badly brutalized to care.  In short, it's just another horror movie folks.

 

I stand by that review and I maintain now that Melancholia is another horror movie.  But I do not think it is "just" another one.  Again, I think it is excellent.  This time out the ending ain't no head-scratcher, that's for sure.  And this time out, the individual mental illness does not "pose" as the apocalypse.  This is because the occult implications in Melancholia are in no way conceptually shabby.  Tracing the etymology of the word "melancholia," Wiki arrives at Old English terms including "saturine," as in, under the influence of Saturn.  The depressive sister is a kind of witch, an intuitive astrological seer, Nostradamus in a dress.  She looks at the sky and knows - just knows - it's over.  In keeping with a Stephen King protagonist, this character is made sick by her own power.

Until she isn't.

 Never mind religion.  We are long past spiritualist hope.  Turns out the man of science can't face the fact.  The lord of the manor with his telescope hedges his bet with a full grocery cart of survivalist supplies.  But his devolution from advanced technologist to hoarder of basic necessities is secondary to him living with a false faith from the get-go, the belief that practical rationality will render him invincible.  Hence, going over to manic panic, he kills himself in supreme selfishness.

And forget about the noble bearing of true love, a mother's love, a sister's love.  The earthy woman of social bonds who honestly cares for her family and thinks it only proper to seek the company of others in town when confronted by crisis, turns out to be yet another who can't face the fact.  Her personality as the reliable nurturer decomposes to reveal that her essence is anxiety which manifests as incapacity.  She too is subject to manic panic, just happens in fits and starts.  Hence, it is only due to her crazy sister that she does not loose her own mind completely.

So it turns out that the depressive, the previously incapacitated, is finally calm, cool and collected.  She is the truly brave person, the sane one in the end, because she has been facing the fact all along.  Only fools and cowards live life to the fullest, feel any sort of purpose that might bring about some sort of immortality.  These foolish cowards, these cowardly fools, want to leave a legacy.  But even if they do write their own epitaph, it is no more meaningful than a commercial copywriter's tag-line.  It is the girl who can't get out of bed in the morning, the gal who is forever mourning, she is the one who is able to shake off the covers come Judgment-less Day.  For she is under the sign of Planet Melancholia.  She has always known that this ain't the age of the dawning of Aquarius.  Hence, she strips naked to bask in the glow of death.

 The trailer