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CINEMA Fade to black Melancholia


DIRECTOR: LARS VON TRIER


cheap. Justine (Kirsten Dunst), the depressive bride at the centre of Lars von Trier’s latest filmMelancholia, has clearly suffered years of people telling her to pull herself together, that it’s not the end of the world. But then one day, out of the cosmic blue, it is. This apocalyptic tale begins on Justine’s


“I


wedding day, a celebration with all the trim- mings and more; at this point, the guests are unaware that any firework display might be outshone by the fast-approaching rogue planet. The reception is held on an island at a manorial hotel owned by Justine’s sister’s husband. Wearing a confection of designer dress, the bride is borne to the location with her new husband in a stretch limo. So over- sized is the car that it becomes wedged on a bend in the drive. The first metaphor is upon us.


I say the action begins there but in fact it is prefaced by an “overture” of mesmerising beauty and power shot in crystalline ultra- slow motion – images of the world breaking down and the laws of physics bending. Bolts of electricity shoot from Justine’s fingers as she looks in wonder at the changes around her – hard surfaces turn soft, molecular struc- tures disintegrate. Von Trier claims he sought to dive into an “abyss of German romanticism” for this film. He would say that this is not so much con- summate film-making (which at one level it certainly is) as surrender to the lowest com- mon denominator, the manipulative


RADIO Day return


Lyrical Journey BBC RADIO 4


t says something for the resonance of Squeeze’s “Up The Junction”, which sold half a million copies in the early summer of 1979, that 32 years later I still have the lyrics by heart (“I never thought it would happen / With the girl from Clapham / Out on the windy common / That night I’ve not forgotten …”). Returned to modern-day Clapham Junction (22 September) by the Lyrical Journey: Up the Junction presenter Jonathan Maitland (and at one point invited to entertain the passers-by on Platform 10), its lyricist Chris Difford first affected bewilderment at the song’s international success before finally con-


I 28 | THE TABLET | 1 October 2011


told you so” is never an attractive phrase; anyone who employs it knows it to be


way that the savagery of Antichrist depicted his


techniques that a film-maker can employ for emotional effect. Put another way, he does it but he hates himself for it. So to accompany the enveloping Wagner there are visual echoes of the Pre-Raphaelites (the image of Dunst floating down a flower- strewn stream is pure Millais “Ophelia”) as well as Surrealists. At one point, the incoming planet’s intervention in the solar system causes double moonshine, casting a de Chirico light over the formal garden of the hotel – at once lovely and disturbing, with shadows cast crossways. As destruction approaches, detached, depressed Justine becomes more certain and relaxed while her equable sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is thrown into a frenzy of concern to protect the living. The knowledge of where the film is inexorably headed actually helps the structure, allowing the audience to concentrate on the reactions. Or maybe that should read to be manipulated by the director. Justine’s blank stare and the trance-like feel of the film make it an effective evocation of depression. There have been suggestions that the whole cinematic process is cathartic for the director – that Melancholia puts his own depression and anxieties on film in the


ceding that it was “a postcard from London”. A kitchen-sink drama in three minutes,


“Up the Junction” follows the career of a working-class couple who move “… into a basement / With thoughts of our engagement …”, have a child and then split up as a result of the male half’s drink problem. Among the ironies of Difford’s return trip was the area’s continuing gentrification: the basement would probably be worth a quarter of a million pounds these days. Much of the song’s south London argot (“This morning at four-fifty / I took her rather nifty / Down to an incubator …”) had gone too. Difford pronounced it a relic of after-hours carousing “in local clubs with villains”. There was a wider context here, which con- versations with author Michael Collins, music journalist David Quantick and art historian Fran Lloyd soon made plain. As a working- class cultural vista, this was more truly located in the 1960s – the world of Difford’s elder brother (a Deptford mod with a passion for scooters), “London Song” by the Kinks and


breakdown. It’s too pat to consider these films purely as his own form of therapy, however. Melancholia even has moments of wry humour. Claire’s husband is played by Kiefer Sutherland as the kind of materialist, rationalist know-all who bluffs his way to disaster. The wedding reception (which admittedly goes on way too long but don’t they always?) is a social and emotional night- mare in which everyone (except poor Claire, the hapless groom and, later, an animal or two) behaves appallingly. Even towards the end, Justine is unsparing in her contemplation of annihilation and reluctant to share any comforting ritual with her sister (except, oddly, one she makes up herself). Humanity is evil, she says; we are all alone in the world – although von Trier actually undermines this bleakness by showing Claire’s unconditional love – and the sooner it’s all over the better. Eventually, Justine gets what she wants, and with images rather less spectacular than those at the beginning, the film (and everything else) ends. That Lars von Trier, he’s such a tease and a torturer, why does he do this to us? Because he has the gift, I suppose, but don’t imagine he feels good about it. Francine Stock


David Bowie, BBC Wednesday night plays and Nell Dunn’s eponymous novel. Collins, in particular, noted the link between what is essentially a tragicomic ballad with the kind of material sung on early twentieth-century music-hall stages. Further ironies emerged in the revelation that Difford had selected “Clapham” as a set- ting because it rhymed with “happen”, and that the lyrics were written not in London SW4 but in a motel 10 miles out of New Orleans in a break from a North American tour.


An interesting debate about whether this was poetry or pop was enlivened by David Quantick, who praised the complexity of the rhyme scheme and remarked how unusual it was, in an art form largely given over to aspir - ation, to find a hit single that ended with its narrator being dragged by the devil from “… bar to street to bookie …”. “They should teach it in schools,” Quantick declared. I couldn’t have agreed more. D.J. Taylor


Apocalyptic vision: Lars von Trier’s Melancholia


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