Provocateur Lars von Trier brings 'Melancholia' melodrama to Cannes Fest

By Kevin Lally

FJI correspondent Daniel Steinhart reports on the new film fromcontroversy magnetLars von Trier and more from the Cannes Film Festival.

The Cannes Film Festival continued into its second leg with the reliably controversial Lars von Trier. Much attention has been paid to the Danish director's bouts with depression and his attempt to sort out his gloom through his films. Previously with Antichrist and now Melancholia, depression seems to have been both a tonic and promotional talking point for his filmic output. At the film's press conference, though, it was some provocative comments made by the sometimes-petulant filmmaker that sent the more headline-driven press into sensationalism overdrive and the festival into damage control. What he said isn't worth detailing here, but it was curious that von Trier wondered out loud if maybe his newest film was "crap." Well, it's not.

Set to Wagner's sweeping Tristan and Isolde, the film preludes with a sequence of slow-motion tableau vivant, likely inspired by German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, intercut with images of a planet crashing into Earth�a felicitous juxtaposition to the universe's formation still fresh from Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. Once again, something big is afoot.

What follows is a twofold structure. In part one, the film focuses on Justine (Kirsten Dunst) at her wedding reception, trying her best to keep it together but unraveling emotionally, much to the guests' concern. The assembled looks like a reunion of past von Trier stars, with Charlotte Gainsbourg as Justine's sister Clare, John Hurt as their father, Stellan Skarsgrd as Justine's boss, and Udo Kier as the wedding coordinator. There's also a nice performance from Kiefer Sutherland as Clare's fussy scientist husband.

Part two helps fill in some of the gaps, as the film turns to Clare, who takes into her home her no-longer-betrothed sister, paralyzed by depression. This time, Clare unravels as she tries to care for Justine while growing increasingly anxious over the news that the planet Melancholia is heading towards Earth.

The planet Melancholia could be read as a rather barefaced and grandiose metaphor for the all-consuming effects of depression, with one sister resigned to them and the other trying her best to ignore them. While the film has traces of the dread found in von Trier's Antichrist, Melancholia is a melodrama on an epic scale, from its intense interest in reaction over action to its use of emotion as devouring force. Strangely, though, the film is not his most emotionally involving, but it's nevertheless an inspired vision.

I've gathered that amongst the international press corps, there's a sense that the typically high representation of underwhelming French films in the main competition is included to appeal to notions of nationalism. Certainly, Mawenn's overstuffed cop drama Poliss seemed to confirm this bias. Attempting a more ambitious approach than her previous investigations of family and performance, she develops a mess of tangled subplots that is more suited to the vast wasteland of French TV. Similarly, Alain Cavalier's Pater seemed a minor work. Mixing his more personal video diaries with a series of fictional vignettes, the film feels half-baked. But in all fairness, I slipped out of the screening early, hoping for an improvement with Naomi Kawasake's Hanezu No Tsuki. Though fleetingly scenic, the film is ultimately flat.

Bertrand's Bonello's beautifully twisted House of Tolerance, however, was an exception to the rule. Set in a fin de sicle Parisian brothel, the film follows the idle days and long nights of a group of prostitutes. Like in Bonello's 2001 Le pornographe, which portrayed the life of a middle-aged pornographer, the new film is interested not in the eroticism of the sex trades, but in the details of the work. Here, the film lingers on the women's attention to hygiene, back-room gossip about clients, inevitable jealousies, and their never-ending debts, which, in effect, make them bound to their madam. The film presents these women as a kind of collective protagonist, but the subjective center of the narrative belongs to a woman named the Jewess, later titled the Woman Who Smiles after a client slits her cheeks, leaving her with a gruesome Joker's sneer.

Judging from some of the film trades' critics' polls, the movie has been one of the least liked�probably owing to its nebulous structure and, as some argue, gratuitously provocative imagery. But the film has a mesmerizing quality which is hard to pin down, arising somewhere out of its drifting camerawork, lush colors and at times anachronistic music. There's been little in Cannes as bold as watching these women mourn the loss of a co-worker by dancing to the sound of The Moody Blues, in what comes off as a moving image of solidarity.

Although technically a French film, Le Havre has all the signature trademarks of Finnish director Aki Kaurismki: deadpan humor, rock 'n' roll, and a cast of lovable losers. In the titular French port city, shoeshiner Marcel Marx harbors a runaway African refugee boy. Under the watchful eye of a neighbor (Jean-Pierre Laud) and a tenacious gumshoe, Marcel carries out a risky gambit to get the boy to his relatives in London. This is the director's second film set in France, but unlike in his previous La vie de bohme, he exchanges an outmoded view of French society for one that takes stock of more contemporary concerns. Tackling immigration, an issue that is as fraught in France as it is across Europe, Kaurismki works with a welcome humanism and lightness of touch.

When there's time, it's always worth escaping the hustle and bustle of the Cannes Festival for a walk down the Croisette to the much calmer la Semaine de la Critique, now celebrating its 50th anniversary. Organized by the French Union of Film Critics, the parallel section emphasizes new work from emerging filmmakers. Although the few films I've taken in have not been the kinds of harbingers that signaled the talents of past participants such as Bernardo Bertolucci, Wong Kar-Wai or Gaspar No, they have brought attention to some unique voices. Winner of the section's Grand Pix, Jeff Nichols' Take Shelter details a Midwestern man's descent into schizophrenia while tapping into a checklist of U.S. anxieties, including terrorism, health care and doomsday weather. Receiving a special mention prize, Justin Kurzel's Snowtown examines a young man's association with notorious Australian serial killer John Bunting, which develops into an involving and brutal social critique about vigilante justice.

Along with the forceful Mexican film Miss Bala, a couple of strong contenders have emerged from the Un Certain Regard pack. Bonsai from Chilean director Christin Jimnez explores the long-range causes and effects of a relationship between two bookish university students by cleverly jumping back and forth across an eight-year gap. In Oslo, 31 August, Norwegian director Joachim Trier (no relation to Lars, although from a filmmaking family) offers a portrait of a 34-year-old recovering addict who goes on leave from his rehab center to Oslo, where he faces the ruins of his past: estranged friends, absent exes and their lovers, squandered opportunities, and temptations at every turn. Introduced by the filmmaker as a movie about loneliness, this perceptive film proves that sometimes on a small-scale, the examination of the most universal themes can be every bit as effective�if not more so�than the outsized ambitions on display elsewhere in the festival.