Melancholia has been compared to The Celebration but Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998 Dogme production gives us all the elements of Family Dysfunction (Oedipal angst, suicide, sexual trauma), which is just a negative image of the Happy Family. I know what he means: Von Trier’s latest isn’t melancholy in either the everyday sense (introverted, wistful) or the Freudian one (furiously, neurotically mournful). Hoberman reported that, upon leaving the Cannes screening, he “felt light, rejuvenated and unconscionably happy” (May 18, 2011). (Her hitherto self-assured husband John, played by Kiefer Sutherland, swallows a bottle of pills rather than have to witness the apocalyptic denouement.) This is certainly no conventionally cheerful narrative and yet the Village Voice’s J. First Justine descends into near-catatonia after her marriage fails on the very night of the wedding when she revives-buoyed, it seems, by the prospect of Armageddon-Claire is wracked by anxiety, terrified by Melancholia’s approach. In between two sisters, mercurial Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and fastidious Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), take it in turns to suffer psychic crisis. ROB WHITE: At the beginning and end of Melancholia two worlds collide: the unloosed rogue planet of the title crashes into Earth to the sound of Wagner’s prelude to Tristan und Isolde.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |