The Snowman

We’re Stalking In The Air...

The Snowman
2017 UK/USA/Sweden
Directed by Tomas Alfredson
UK cinema release print.

The Snowman is set and shot in Norway... being, in some ways, an example of what is popularly becoming known as Nordic Noir. It’s based on a novel by Norweigan writer Jo Nesbø and I saw another, quite good movie based on a novel by him a few years back called Headhunters (reviewed here). This one... well it’s not so good, to be honest... although it does have a nice visual quirk that makes it kinda interesting at times. The trailer was pretty good, however (better than the film and I’ll come back to the trailer) and, since the movie stars the always brilliant Michael Fassbender, this was one of the movies I was looking forward to seeing this winter.

That being said, I’ve read or heard of reviews which have been tearing this to pieces, saying that the movie is incoherent and makes no sense. Well, that one I can certainly put to rest and say that, yes, the movie is certainly coherent and, yes, it makes complete sense... to the point where the identity of the killer might be fairly obvious to the audience, alas. However, to some of the more ‘high profile’ newspaper reviewers of this film I would say that they should maybe concentrate more on what is said when people open their mouths to talk as, you know, the storyline and connections made in this really aren’t rocket science. Or, you know, familiarise yourself with the language of cinema by maybe going out and watching more films... if you really are finding this stuff confusing.

However, what this film does suffer from, I would say, is a lack of on-screen content to allow for the more leisurely pacing that the director brings to this. I’ll get back to that in a minute but I’ll talk about some of the positive things in this first.

The number one positive is the acting in this is all nicely done. Not many duds here. Fassbender’s portrayal of Nesbø regular Harry Hole is pretty great and even though not everything is spelled out for us, we get a real sense that there’s an interesting history to this character (this is a number of books into the series, apparently, so I’m sure there certainly is). The character is pretty much on the rocks, drinking and trying to cope with, at the very least, being dumped by his girlfriend but still maintaining a friendship with her son and also, to an extent, with the son’s ‘new dad’. The way Fassbender plays him shows everything with his body language... you get the feeling that this man is completely out of shape but that he once used to be a brilliant detective and his previous career is briefly alluded to by his new partner, played pretty nicely by Rebecca Ferguson. They’re both ably backed up by an incredible bunch of actors including Chloë Sevigny, Val Kilmer (playing someone who you totally wouldn’t expect Val Kilmer to be playing and making it very different to some of his other work), J. K. Simmons (ditto, he’s certainly not typecasting himself here), Toby Jones and the always utterly compelling Charlotte Gainsbourg as Harry’s friendly ex-girlfriend Rakel.

And the story beats are good too. Once you get into the idea that the scenes with Val Kilmer are flashbacks and slowly start to sew them together in your head with the case Harry is working on, the more sense they make. I did not see the relationship between Kilmer and one of the characters in the modern timeline until it was pretty much revealed, so that’s a good thing. However, this also leads me onto some of the bad stuff like... no matter how stupidly coincidental all of the puzzle pieces are when they fit together, the unlikeliness of them does not detract you from being able to spot the killer a good long while before that identity is made known. So that’s not so good.

Another bad thing is that, when we have the final denouement between Harry and the killer, Harry is competely powerless to do anything much and the demise of said killer is competely coincidental. A serendipitous moment which seems really stupid... ironically poetic given the film’s pre-credit sequence, sure but... yeah, it’s not the smartest ending it could have had. It probably works much better, I suspect, in a novel than it does for an audience when confronted with the irony in a visual manner but, there you go.

Back to my thing about pacing versus content. Yeah, it feels like the film is being rushed and severely edited. For such languid pacing I would have expected something more like a three hour film which takes its time to build up more depth to the characters and the causes of the story they find themselves in. This seems a bit choppy and... this kinda makes sense actually, in terms of the end result. It wasn’t until I was leaving the cinema that I realised that there were a lot more things happening in the trailer than you actually see in the final release print of the movie. So... I might be wrong here but... I suspect the studio shortened it to tighten it somehow when, quite possibly, it would have worked much better as a longer piece. I obviously can’t ever do more than guess at that one but... that’s my very best guess.

Like I said though... some nice things too.

One of them being the director's seeming visual obsession of people looking at things through windows. Most of the characters seem to be constantly putting themselves in situations where they are either outside and showing the audience what’s going on from looking in through a window into a scene or, the reverse... where something’s going on outside and the audience are looking at a character looking outside the window. It’s a really bizarre thing because I’ve not noticed anyone doing this kind of thing quite so often in a movie before and it became fairly amusing waiting for the next ‘through the glass’ shot to pop up.

Also, the murders themselves are quite inventively grizzly. They mostly involve people being cut up into pieces with decapitation clearly a favourite of the killer. The antagonist’s trademark is to build a snowman nearby and, quite often he will either leave a snowman’s head in the bloody neck stump of his victim or, vice versa, plop the victims head onto the body of one of his snowmen. So some interestingly gruesome visuals in this thing, for sure, although the director plumps to not focus on them for very long. There’s a nice moment when someone’s head is blown clean off with a shotgun, too, which is not telegraphed in any fashion and comes as a surprise. So some interesting artistic decisions made around violence and its aftermath in this film, I would say.

And finally we have  Marco Beltrami’s excellent score which nicely captures the languid pacing in the way Harry Hole proceeds about his daily life. It kinda sounds like a spy movie score from the mid to late 1970s in its tone at some points. Not as strident or highly stylised as, say, a John Barry score from that era and more like the kind of ‘softer but definitely a distant cousin’ of that kind of cold war music that you were getting a decade later. It’s a good one and I’m pleased that the score is scheduled to get a proper CD release later in the month. Looking forward to giving this one a few spins away from the movie.

So there you have it. The Snowman is not the terrible movie that some of the critics have been saying, I think but... it is quite disappointing in that it’s not a great movie either. Fassbender and Gainsbourg are absolutely marvellous in these characters and I’d like to see them both return to play them again. Alas, I suspect the box office on this one won’t be so great either so I suspect that’s not a prospect I can look forward to in the near future. This one isn’t essential viewing but it’s okay if there’s nothing else on at your local that you want to see. Maybe give it a go.

Independence Day - Resurgence

Resurge Gainsbourg

Independence Day - Resurgence
2016 USA Directed by Roland Emmerich
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Technically a slight spoiler for
the original movie, if you’ve never seen it.

Hmmm... okay. I guess we all remember the trailer campaign for the original Independence Day in 1996, right? Those of us who are old enough to remember... which it turns out wasn’t the case with the girl selling me my ticket to this screening, when I asked her about how this one was.

It was kind of a ‘wearing you down’ campaign for a hugely budgeted movie about Americans saving the planet from alien invaders by hacking into their alien technology with an Apple computer. This was in the days when Apple were truly great, of course, and not the huge, greedy, corporate money trap they’ve become in just the last few years. We all kinda half trusted Roland Emmerich in those days because he’d caught the current zeitgeist... or more like recreated it... when he brought out a movie before this called Stargate. So when we all sat down to watch the original Independence Day in cinemas, in spite of the gruelling trailer campaign, most of us kinda liked it. Which was okay and lasted about as long as until we got the home video version when, I suspect, a good deal of us realised that we would never want to watch this rubbish ever again.

So here we have a sequel that nobody wanted... or at least I didn’t... taking place 20 years after the original movie in both reality and fictional terms and calling itself Independence Day - Resurgence. I didn’t really want to see this one at all, to be honest, but I’d rather see it on my Cineworld Unlimited card for free (more or less) to find out if it’s any good rather than risk buying a cheap blu ray in a sale at a later point. So I went down to my local on its first Saturday morning and was astonished to find, just like the screening of Gods Of Egypt the week before (reviewed here), that there were only five people, including myself, in the screening for the 3D showing. So, yeah... wondering what that will mean for the box office.

Now, as it turns out, I quite enjoyed this sequel and found it to be a lot more engaging than the first movie. What surprised me, though, is that it felt like a different kind of film. Although the budget for this was somewhere around 165 million dollars... which is just silly... I would be lying if I were to say the money was easy to see on the screen and, despite an abundance of relatively impressive special effects shots, it actually felt more like a small, chamber piece of a sequel, rather than a full blown affair. The original movie back in 1996 maybe suffered from feeling too much like it was trying to be an epic movie. This time around, it doesn’t feel like it’s trying to be too splashy and, surprisingly, that really helps it, I think.

Anyone hoping to see Will Smith reprise his character will have to make do with the substitute of that character’s son, played by Jessie T. Usher. He doesn’t get a heck of a lot of screen time to be honest but it’s okay because, like the first film, he’s joined by some great actors, a fair few who were veterans of the first movie. So we have newcomers Liam Hemsworth, Maika Monroe, Angelababy and the always watchable William Fichtner, mixing it up with the likes of the charismatic Jeff Goldblum, Judd Hirsch, the brilliant Bill Pullman and, playing a slightly less irritating version of the character he played in the first movie... Brent Spiner. And the icing on the cake is the amazingly brilliant actress Charlotte Gainsbourg playing the love interest/female professor element to the film, Catherine Marceaux .

Okay, so a bunch of cool cast members does not a cool movie make but, like I said, we’re in luck because this feels a little different to the kind of movie the first one was. I mentioned above that it’s not just been made twenty years later... it’s set twenty years after the first film too. What that means in terms of the world that survived the alien invasion in that first one is that man has evolved into a species where every nation is at peace and where the technology has advanced to a level far removed by where we are in the real world. This is pure science fiction in that we have a weapons defence system around the Earth, a moonbase and... yeah, it’s definitely a highly futuristic version of 2016 presented here. So it feels less like it’s trying to be a disaster movie and maybe that’s why, in general, this sequel is a lot more pacier and entertaining than the first outing. It doesn’t hurt that it doesn’t have the humongous running time of the first one either. It’s a straight two hours but, this time around, it doesn’t get dull and it flies by real fast, I have to say.

The film is quite clichéd, as you would expect it to be, but that doesn’t rip the teeth out of those old tried and tested movie conventions and helps build drama in a way that you can tell the director is an old hand at manipulating people’s emotion through moving image... which is no bad thing when you are directing a sequel that nobody really wants, I guess. For instance, the writers spend a good deal of time setting up just how powerful the Earth’s defence against any returning invasion forces are and, when they start doing this, you just know they’re setting you up so that they can quickly rip them out from under you and bring you back to the equivalent of bows and arrows against the Gods and... yeah, that pretty much happens and exactly when you’d expect it to, to be honest. But, in a way, you kind of know that has to happen in order to move the story on so it’s not so much of a disappointment and, like I said... it’s an entertaining movie.

The writers also, however, add another factor to this movie which I don’t want to spoil too much but... lets just say, there’s a lot of scope for a future sequel and if that happens, it’s probably not going to be going in a direction that someone who hasn’t seen this particular movie would expect it to go in. I don’t want to spoil the surprises here but, suffice it to say, man shouldn’t always be arrogant enough to think he’s the most important species in the Universe and that’s kinda highlighted here, no doubt about that.

Now, I would have loved it if David Arnold could have returned to score this sequel to one of his big movie hits but, alas, this time the scoring duties go to Harald Kloser and Thomas Wanker (the latter being credited as Thomas Wander on this one, for some reason). Now, it’s really not a bad bit of scoring and I am going to see what it plays like on its own (assuming a proper, physical CD gets released) but I did feel it sounded a little inappropriate and over-the-top in its thematic exuberance at certain points. However, this probably just means I’ll enjoy it a hell of a lot more as a stand alone album so... yeah, that’ll happen for me at some point, I think. It mostly seems to work though so... would’ve been nice to reunite Arnold with the franchise but this isn’t too bad either.

And that’s me done for this movie. I kinda liked this one and I really wasn’t expecting to. The script isn’t terrible, the line delivery is good and it doesn’t quite throw the USA patriotic thing down your throat constantly like the original movie seemed to do... which is always a good thing.  If you liked the first Independence Day movie, then you probably won’t have too much of a problem with this one. If you didn’t think the first one was all that great then.. you might be pleasantly surprised because Independence Day: Resurgence is a much smaller affair compared to the large sprawl of the first film. There’s a good chance you won’t be bored here at all, in fact. I was quite glad I gave it a go, even though the trailer looked terrible, so... yeah, maybe give this one a chance.

3 Coeurs (Three Hearts)

Internal Affairs

3 Coeurs (Three Hearts) 
2014  France/Germany/Belgium
Directed by Benoît Jacquot
Seen as part of the London Film Festival 
on Saturday 18th October 2014

3 Coeurs (Three Hearts) is a film I picked to see as part of this year’s London Film Festival mainly because of the calibre of the three main actresses involved... Charlotte Gainsbourg, Chiara Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve... although Deneuve is not actually one of the main protagonists of this film, like the first two I mention here.

One of the people I hadn’t bargained for being thrown into the mix is Benoit Poelvoorde, the guy who played the serial killer and co-wrote and co-directed the excellent 1992 Belgium fake documentary Man Bites Dog. It took me a while to place him because he is playing such a charming and unassuming fellow who also happens to be the male romantic lead of this movie. I’m not familiar with the director of this one, Benoît Jacquot, and he’s not a name I  would have recognised although, on the strength of this film, I have to say I should probably seek out some more of this guys work because 3 Coeurs is a really interesting movie.

Now this is not the film I was expecting it to be... which was something along the lines of a long treatise on the way people coincidentally shift in and out of each other’s lives with characters agonising over lost chances and philosophising over the breakfast table. Turns out it doesn’t really get into that territory at all and, though I would have been happy to settle for that, this film is a much more interesting affair because of the way it’s both shot and presented. Let me tell you a little about the opening quarter of an hour or so of the movie because a brief flavour of where the plot starts off will enable me to explain why this film is so different in the way it attacks the heart and mind.

Benoit Poelvoorde plays Marc, a man with a very acute heart condition. The film begins with him missing the last train home back to Paris from a job he is involved with for his work as a tax inspector. Not knowing what to do he has a coffee in a nearby cafe and then spies a good looking girl who he asks about finding a hotel room for the night. On their way to a hotel, he and Sylvie, played beautifully (as always) by the incomparable Charlotte Gainsbourg, start getting on together really well and instead of him staying overnight in a hotel, the two instead just talk and walk around the city, beginning the start of what they think will be a romantic relationship (it is and it isn’t, don’t want to say too much about that). Just like the main protagonists of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, the two plan to meet up later without exchanging numbers. Sylvie offers to travel on the train to Paris where the two will rendezvous at 6pm on the following Friday, at a specific place.

And this is where things get interesting... not on the level of what is actually happening in the movie, but in terms of the way the information is presented. It’s possibly a bit obvious to say that Sylvie and Marc don’t manage to meet up. Sylvie is on time but due to a series of unfortunate circumstances, including Marc feinting in his car due to his heart condition, while racing to the agreed spot, Sylvie eventually leaves before the, very late, Marc can keep the appointment. Now the reason why this particular sequence is good, and the way it informs the film in general, is because it’s done almost as a suspense sequence. You actually do feel, right from this early on the film, that something is at stake here. And one of the main reasons for that is the outstanding choice which has been made in regard to the direction that veteran composer Bruno Coulais takes his score in...

Do you know that sequence in Jean Luc Godard’s Le Mepris (Contempt), near the start of the movie where Brigitte Bardot is sitting on a bed telling a story. The music is suddenly pulled in and it’s overpowering and sinister as heck... at odds with the actual images on screen which, in turn, pops you out of the movie and makes you question it in exactly the way Godard wanted you to do... using it as a distancing device so you don’t get too immersed in the narrative. Well the score on 3 Coeurs is somewhat like that. It’s very powerful on the soundtrack and it’s very, very sinister. It doesn’t quite pop you out of things like the Godard but it is extremely strong and it’s immediately telling you something is going to happen here... something is very wrong... this is more dangerous than you may think. So right from the start you do not want these two to miss their rendezvous but, almost inevitably they do. Now bear with me while I go back to the plot set up for a bit.

Sylvie goes back to the relationship she was about to leave. She runs an antique shop with her sister Sophie, played by Chiara Mastroianni but going back to her current boyfriend who she doesn’t, in all honesty, seem that happy with, means she now leaves the country to go with him at his new work place in Minneapolis, in the USA. Both Sophie and their mother, played by Catherine Deneuve are sad at this turn of events but there’s nothing to be done. However, not long after Sylvie has gone, the antique shop is in trouble for some accidentally undeclared taxes and Marc, finds Sophie in "a state" in the corridor in his workplace. At this point he has no idea that this woman has any connection to Sylvie and the missed meeting, and vice versa, and so he courteously offers to travel to Sophie’s home town and go through her books. The two become involved and...

And that’s where I am leaving the story set up I think. You really don’t want to know much more about the main plot line and it’s not necessary. But what telling you the set up allows me to do is talk a little more about the treatment of the film. All the way through, when things twist and turn in the hearts of the characters, we always have that sinister scoring coming back to haunt us and tell us... yes, this is really dangerous. And since we are talking about “love affairs” here... I have to hand it to the French again, cliché or not, and say that they really know how to treat their romantic plotting seriously. I’m not a stranger to having an affair (don’t even begin to judge me as you’ve no idea of the circumstances and I’m not going to go into them here... other than to say it was the absolute right path to take at the time) and what the addition of the creepy music and the way in which this film is shot (I’ll come to that in a minute) does is to not make light of the people in question. When you are engaged in that kind of activity it can feel dangerous, it can make one of you feel anxious (I’m told) and the way it’s handled in this movie absolutely makes you feel it. So really good work all around there.

The shooting is interesting because you have a lot of long shots of the characters as you gaze at them through restaurant windows or watch them go on walks but, this is contrasted with the emotional weight of some of their conversations being filmed right up close and personal. The director here isn’t doing a Sergio Leone but we do get some pretty hefty close ups of the characters when they are talking about important stuff. More so than I’ve noticed in a lot of other movies and it really helps the spectator focus the mind and listen carefully to what is being said, in words or in body language, throughout the course of the film.

There was a Q&A with the director of this after the screening, with a translator who was trying to keep up with a director going way to fast and saying far too much before pausing, and consequently some of the director’s words may have been, shall we say, lost in translation. However, one of the things I did glean from his words of wisdom was that he wanted to shoot a romantic film in the style of a crime drama. He wanted to try it out and I have to say, when he said that, the sinister, almost overkill, on the music and the way in which the camera follows people around voyeuristically in contrast to the scenes where important information is being exchanged between two characters, all fell into place...

There’s a point in the movie where the family, including the three main protagonists, have all gone for a walk in the woods and have all gone their own ways, split into little groups. Marc is in pursuit of Sylvie who seems to be trying to avoid him, for the sake of Sophie. Marc stops at the edge of a ravine and the tension at this point is so extreme that I was wondering if he was going to kill himself by hurling himself from the top. Then, when Sylvie comes into shot behind him, I wasn’t sure if she was going to go over and kiss him or push him over the edge... it had me guessing and, I have to say, neither of these things happened. But the music and camerawork had come together so effectively that I was obviously worried about the characters big time. And that’s a rarity with me in cinema these days, it has to be said. So the director's approach to the unusual treatment of the material, mixing one genre with the cinematic syntax of another, really paid off.

What more can I say. Brilliant performances, acting, writing, cinematography, direction and composition. 3 Coeurs is an absolute corker of a movie which will apparently be getting some kind of cinematic UK release in May 2015. If you get an opportunity to see this one, I’d definitely recommend that you take it.

Incompresa (aka Misunderstood)

Aria Pigeon

Incompresa (aka Misunderstood)
2014  Italy/France
Directed by Asia Argento.
Seen as part of the Raindance Film Festival on Saturday 4th October

I’ve been aware of Asia Argento as an artist to be reckoned with for a decade or two now. Ever since getting interested in her famous father’s various gialli and horror films and seeing her pop up in a few roles in both his and his contemporaries’ movies such as her feature film debut as an actress in Demons 2 and through to such classic Dario Argento films as Trauma and The Stendahl Syndrome (amongst others).

She’s also, of course, a very beautiful model, on top of being a talented actress, but the thing that pleased me most about this woman was about ten years ago when I finally got around to seeing her debut as a feature film director, Scarlet Diva. There were some really great things going on in this film and the camerawork was both inventive and unintrusive, when it needed to be, in equal measure. I remember saying to a friend of mine at the time that I thought she was maybe an even better director than her father.

She hasn’t directed that many features over the last 14 years since Scarlet Diva and I’ve never understood why. In fact, despite working behind the camera on a lot of shorts, Incompresa is only her third feature, following on from The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things (a film I’ve not gotten around to seeing, I have to admit). So when I saw her tweeting over the last year or so about the film she was making (Yeah, I follow her on twitter, what can I say?) I was getting kinda interested in seeing this thing and when she announced that there would be a couple of screenings in the UK, as part of the 22nd Raindance Film Festival in London, I was straight on the phone to my friends to see who wanted to go with me.

Incompresa is the story of a young girl growing up in a troublesome family environment, split between an artistic father, who is an actor, and a pianist mother who are at each others throats whenever they are occupying the same homes... which is rarely. The whole scenario is seen through the eyes of the daughter, Aria, who also has a sister (who is her mother’s favourite) and a loathsome step sister (who is her father’s favourite). Aria is just trying to lead a normal life in a world where the sting of disappointment and unfair peer pressure is taking its toll just a little more than usual.

It would perhaps be a little too easy to say that Incompresa is an autobiographical film. There are some striking resemblances that could easily appear to an outside observer, aka the audience, to be indications that the director is what this film is all about. The young protagonist’s name Aria is only one letter out from Asia, for instance. The always fantastic and watchable Charlotte Gainsbourg here plays Aria’s troublesome mother, a self confessed “love witch” and the way she is made up in the movie strongly calls to mind the presence of Asia’s real life mother, the equally wonderful Daria Nicolodi. Anyone who knows anything about some of the stories about how Suspiria and the Three Mothers trilogy came into being will know that there’s a strong connection to witchery there too. Similarly, I’ve no idea if Dario Argento is superstitious or not but the “actor” father of Aria could easily be a surrogate Dario for all I know.

So yes, a little tempting and, as I said, too easy a target for accusations of biographical intent, especially since Asia Argento has maintained that the movie is not intended to be. That being said, however, she is very much an artist and artists do tend to take what they know and plough it back into their works... so I don’t think it would be too unfair to say that there’s also an element of the finished product which takes bits of her life and reshapes them to fit the overall drama. Or so it seems to me, anyway. That's pretty much how everyone working in a creative medium uses personal experience to shape and inform their art.

The structure of the film is not what I was expecting. Rather than take a specific arc from one starting point to a place where a sense of closure is maintained, the story is episodic in nature and presents dramatic sequences which build up a gradual picture of the main protagonist, through the observations of both the problems and the good times piled onto little Aria, played so assuredly by Giulia Salerno. In fact, the constant traipsing between the houses of both her father and her mother as she commits some new wrong and is expelled from each of her father’s or mother’s house in turn, time after time, make this seem to be something of a road movie at heart. Aria certainly wears out a lot of shoe leather in her to-ing and fro-ing and, it has to be said, the sequences where she is seen journeying from one house to another is used as a form of punctuation or grammar for the piece... sometimes invoking a comical reaction and, at other times, underlining the drama of a situation in the most moving way.

In a way, it’s the journey that’s always the important bit in this movie, rather than the destination, and as Aria stirs up trouble with black cats and pigeons (her father is depicted as a victim to superstition), stolen letters and various other attempts to explore her life and gain the attention of the kid she likes in school, the more we become aware of something that maybe some of us have forgotten over the years... how hard it is to be a kid.

Of course, Argento frames the various adventures of her young characters with some of the best compositions she can find in the various locations... the vision of Aria walking away from the camera at a three quarter angle against a vertical slatted fence which perfectly frames the perspective is a shot that springs to mind... and I wouldn’t expect anything less from her. What is more telling is how close I think she must be to the heart of the story she is trying to shape. She manages to coax some amazing performances out of all the kids in this film, with the aforementioned Giulia Salerno absolutely knocking it out of the park in terms of conjuring up a little girl who I totally believed in throughout the running time.

My favourite part of the film, for instance, is when Aria stumbles across a group of homeless people and stays with them for the night, making a connection based on the spirit of movement and exploration that captures the hearts of her new, adult companions. The relationship she creates with the young rock star boyfriend (one of many boyfriends her mother courts throughout the film) is also a great series of moments in the film and also shows that Asia Argento hasn’t forgotten to show the good things about being a kid too. Which is refreshing in a film which seems to court tragedy as a friend.

Now I’m not sure if Incompresa is going to get a general release over here in the UK but, even if it doesn’t, I’m pretty sure something this well made should hit DVD or Blu Ray over here at some point. It’s one of the more entertaining and moving motion pictures I’ve seen dealing with this kind of subject matter (yeah, alright, I admit to tearing up in two places, okay... but only for a minute, honest) so I’m hoping it gets some kind of release soon. If you like films which try to find the truth through the journey of a child’s heart then this one is definitely worth some of your time. And like I said, both Giulia Salerno and Charlotte Gainsbourg give some terrific performances here so you don't really want to miss that. Once again, Asia Argento flexes her movie making muscles and shows the general public a side to her they never knew before. And, of course, she also reiterates that she is a film-maker to be taken very seriously.

Melancholia

Melancholia Baby

Melancholia 2011 Denmark/Sweden/France/Germany

Directed by Lars Von Trier

Screening at UK cinemas.

Warning: Earth shattering spoilers ensue!

Melancholia is, quite simply, one of the most visually beautiful films of 2011.

It’s no surprise to me in the slightest, though I’ve only seen a few of his films, that Von Trier can deliver such beautiful and meticulous work... but to people who associate him with the Dogme ‘95 movement, the sheer artificial beauty of his creations may come as a bit of a surprise. But like I said... not to me.

I first became aware of Von Trier back in 1991 (wow, I’ve been watching this guy on and off for 20 years?) when I went to the old Lumiere cinema in St. Martin’s Lane to see his brilliant movie Europa (aka Zentropa in some countries). It was the first film I remember seeing which relly wallowed in it’s own artificial construction to create elaborate effects on screen. The first movie I could remember, specifically, barring minor moments like a single shot in Rumblefish, where both colour and black & white photography collided on screen in beautifully surreal moments where they would bleed into each other’s separate elements like a mixed media collage. And when I say bleed, it really did in certain scenes... I remember well, one character slashing his wrists into a bowl of water in black and white and the blood flowing into the water as a bright red element.

Backgrounds could be changed too like an old 50's Hollywood rear projection shot... except here the technique was almost flawless and a character could be interacting in a real environment which could suddenly turn into a visual metaphor in the background.

It came as a bit of a shock, I would have to say, when Von Trier founded the Dogme ‘95 group with their pledge to remove pretty much all artificality from film. This never stood well with me and I was quite vocal at the time because it’s pretty obvious to me that you can’t make a movie without at least lighting or tweaking or positioning some element of a shot... the very act of which surely renders void the entire exercise in the first place. It was not that unexpected when even the first film that came out of the gate of this experimental style broke it’s own rules and many followed suit (is my understanding) in this lack of rigidity to contribute to a pretty much impossible, idealistic concept.

I remember seeing Von Trier’s Dogville (and getting bored about a half of the way through the movie), a film clearly named after the manifesto of its creator, and thinking to myself that the act of stripping down a whole community to invisible rooms marked out with white lines and labels was far more artifical in its nature than just filming in such a community could ever be.

I got back into Von Trier when his last movie, Antichrist, came out and thought this movie was pretty okay and it certainly shares the same sheer visual beauty as his new movie Melancholia... so he’s definitely back into a new phase of his work, now free to embrace the artifice of his craft once more.

Melancholia starts off with some surreal and occasionally confusing imagery... some of which I believe is based on a group of paintings that one of the two lead protagonists, Justine (played by Kirsten Dunst) puts out on display in one of her “funny spells”. Definitely spotted a nod to that Pre-Raphaelite painting of the girl in the lake which was responsible for the death of the model (no, I’m sorry, I don’t remember the name of this famous painting). The other main protagonist, her sister Claire (played by Charlotte Gainsbourg), has some very heavy footsteps in a field in this sequence which remind me of another painting, the title of which also escapes me (Not doing very well on the art front am I? Sorry people). After some 5 or 10 minutes of beautiful imagery, the earth is destroyed as it collides with another planet and, all through the film we are encouraged to assume that this is how the movie will end (although the giveaway clue here is Dunst seen in two different dresses). After the title card immediately following the destruction of the earth, the film is then split into two parts seemingly set before the events just depicted have taken place...each part named after their central characters. The first part deals with Justine who is going to her own wedding reception at claire’s mansion house. Over the course of this fairly gruelling sequence (if, like me, you are not a social animal) we see her wreck both her marriage and her career in an uncomfortable haze of aggressive depression, possibly manifested by the newly discovered planet Melancholia which appears to be on a collision course with earth, in front of a whole host of big name supporting cast (such as Charlotte Rampling, John Hurt, Stellan Skaarsgard and even Claire’s husband played by Kiefer Sutherland).

The second part, named after Claire, is set some time after (a few months perhaps) when Justine is so depressed she can’t even get out of bed without major coaxing by her sister (yeah, did this stuff remind me big time of my ex-girlfriend) and tells of Claire’s fear of her belief that the earth will be pulverised by Melancholia, her husband’s certainty that it won’t and, their son who is getting as excited as his dad by this rare astronomical discovery. It also shows Justine in sharp contrast still to her sister, with whom she doesn’t share much in common. However, it also becomes apparent that Justine can see things that are going to happen and she believes Melancholia will be the death of them all (even when it seems to be receding) and is not frightened by it but is happy to embrace the peace that death will bring to her.

It has to be said at this point that nothing really happens in terms of story (except for, you know, the destruction of the entire planet). It is a beautifully framed and never boring study of the thoughts and actions of two diametrically opposed sisters who are anticipating the approaching end of the world. In this way, it perhaps shares a commonality with Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice or Akira Kurosawa’s I Live In Fear (aka Record Of A Living Being) but the film is very much its own thing and is an absolute joy to watch... although be warned it is quite bleak in some ways.

If I had one complaint about the film in general it’s that we didn’t need to see the destruction of the world at the end... we know it’s inevitable, leave it unsaid and end the movie half a day before it occurs maybe? However, having said that, the shot of the death of the world at the end does elaborate the point that the imagery at the start of the film was actually nothing more than a visionary “premonition of events” by Justine and not a fixed point we’ve flashed back too... there are clues in the dialogue which may lead you to this conclusion that the opening is not actually a flashback but something else entirely... but the end shot certainly leaves no doubt in the mind of the viewer about the nature of the movie’s prologue.

As I’ve implied, I would have expected and liked to have seen a more ambiguous ending to this movie in terms of the sometimes surreal opening montage, but maybe I just prefer less clarity and room to speculate with works like this. And, anyway, Kirsten Dunst does have scenes where she takes her clothes off... so that more than outweighs the slight dissatisfaction with the last minute or two of the movie.

Don’t miss Melancholia. A beautiful film made by an artist with a sure, steady and confident hand as befitting the longevity of his career. It probably won’t be playing for long so catch this visual magic while it’s still playing on the big screen!