La Terra Trema

Lars von Trier's cinema of the apocalypse adds a vivid, exhilarating title to its list of films with Melancholia. Here is a film about two sisters who experience life and its disasters in different ways, and it's difficult at times to argue who's better equipped or prepared for not only the mundane, but also apocalyptic disaster. The film's opening sequence, a stunningly filmed series of enacted paintings-as-images, shows us exactly what to expect: a planet named Melancholia crashes into Earth and destroys it. In the film that follows, we see characters busying themselves with future-oriented events while we know that everyone will die. 

It is Justine's (Kirsten Dunst, Cannes-winner for Best Actress) wedding day. She's getting married to the kind-looking Michael (Alexander Skarsgard). Her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourgh) and her husband John (Kiefer Sutherland) have made their mansion available to the couple for their nuptials. Also attending are the sisters' estranged and destructive parents: father Dexter (John Hurt), who seems to have lost some of his mental clarity, and mother Gaby (Charlotte Rampling), who is a hardened beast. The most despicable character there, though, is surely Jack (Stellan Skarsgard), who is Justine's boss and does not let a single opportunity pass to mine her for work related information. For a moment, as we engage with these characters, the planet's destruction takes a back seat to a series of cosmically smaller but nonetheless significant events that occur as empty marriage rituals play out.

The film is divided in two parts, each associated with a sister and the privileging that particular perspective. While the first part focuses on Justine, the second follows Claire. Some time has passed between parts one and two, and there are clear differences in how the sisters act toward one another. It makes sense that Justine would be in the ad industry; she works in a world of fleeting significance and money-for-time-measured patriarchal significance. In De Sade's tale, the character Justine is a victimised female trying to make her way in a world that seems to thwart and threaten her at every turn regardless of her goodwill and good intentions. De Sade would later write another book, this time detailing the plight of Justine's sister Juliette. Discussing De Sade in conversation with von Trier falls beyond the scope of this review, but there's certainly something to be said about the Danish filmmaker's tale of two sisters that face not only a life that seems ill at home to inhabit, but the greater destruction of the entire world and its inhabitants. There is no divine judgment or cause for this destruction: it is simply a cosmological inevitability.

If Melancholia speaks to Sadean notions of pain, suffering and existence, there is something of the contemplative Tarkovsky in the film as well. The Russian master is well known for a couple of influential three-hour epics including the stark Stalker, but von Trier seems to invoke the resonance of the religious yet grounded potency of Andrei Rublev while consciously pointing us towards Tarkovsky's psychological masterwork, Solaris (later remade by Steven Soderbergh and starring George Clooney). In Solaris, a planet seems to engage with characters' consciousness to conjure up figures form their past, memory figments that look and feel real but are entirely the co-creations of the space station inhabitants (unwittingly) and the planet (deliberately), which seems to be a pulsing orb of consciousness. It is strongly suggested that the earth's destruction - a place Justine describes as full of evil - is brought on by her own depression. 

Yet there is another text that illuminates Melancholia in a different way: the first Dogme film, Thomas Vinterberg's devastating family drama Festen in which a birthday party at an exclusive lodge becomes a battleground between father and son as they stake their claims for the truth of the past. Melancholia moves between Dogme-like "realistic" shots to formalised, poetic imagery with ease, and like Festen has a (less overt) class dimension to it. 

And in all the destruction and psychological disintegration (and, for some, solidification), Melancholia is an exhilarating, positive film. Instead of anchoring the viewer to despair it shows the end of existence as first and foremost a psychological reality that is not without its positive points. Accompanied by a gorgeous soundtrack ("Tristan & Isolde") to complement its images and less invasive than Antichrist, Melancholia has greater resonance and is more spectacular than anything Roland Emmerich has ever done. No wonder it was completely ignored by the Academy Awards. 

(Special kudos to Kiefer Sutherland, who for the first time in more than a decade is not simply re-rendering Jack Bauer.)

Lost in America

Oregon is hard country. Its soil invites death. It’s dry, difficult terrain at the best of times, especially if you’re negotiating it with a bunch of wagons under the dubious guidance of a man who may or may not know where he’s taking you. Meek’s Cutoff is the latest film from regional filmmaker extraordinaire Kelly Reichardt, and her second collaboration with the talented Michelle Williams. Set in the 1845 Wild West frontier with the reality of possibly hostile native encounters, Meek’s Cutoff can easily be seen as a near timeless anti-Western. Its physical and psychological meandering is universal. 

En route to a new beginning, Emily (Williams) doubts that Meek (Bruce Greenwood) knows where he’s taking the people who follow him. They are only a few; three couples (including the great Will Patton, Paul Dano, Neal Huff, Zoe Kazan), one child. Their trek is a minor one but no less hard than others. It is clear that others also fear for the worst: that their leader has no idea where they’re going. Early in the film, one character scratches a single word on a log: “LOST”. It’s an eerie image, accurate and indicative not only of the characters’ predicament but also that the issue is not openly discussed. Etched into wood, at least there’s some manifest permanence to the idea. 

They trek. They are hungry, with limited food supplies, but the threat of running out of water is the worst. Then one day on party member spots an Indian on a nearby ridge, and their feelings of uncertainty and vulnerability increase. Maybe they should turn back, but will they be able to sustain themselves? Will they find their way? Maybe they should stick to Meek, who entertains the men with tall tales, and is at least the devil they know. 

Somewhere in the film an additional character joins the travellers. He is unlike them and inspires fear in some, particularly a distrustful and weak Meek, empathy in others. One should be weary to not exclusively read the other characters’ interactions with this man as politically loaded. As the film progressed I became convinced that it is a deeply psycho-symbolic text on psychological integration and accountability. The film has something to say about masculinity, about a male insistence on certain success, and about men who prefer questioning and contemplation when faced with starvation. It's no surprise that the strongest (in many ways) character is Williams' Emily, who understands the men that travel with her.    

Reichardt’s confidence as a filmmaker is evident in scenes where the characters try to match up against the indifferent landscape that threatens to spit them out. The film does not have much of a soundtrack; there are the characters, their words, and the silence of the vastness that can claim their lives. The striking cinematography has a near palpable purity to it, as if the images are crisp, clean and objective. 

Their journey continues up to the film’s ending, an enigmatic and open moment that is best interpreted symbolically. It’s the kind of ending that have regular moviegoers ripping out their own hair, and that of the person sitting next to them. I couldn’t help but think of the famous line from that masterwork No Country for Old Men, “You can’t stop what’s coming”. That film demonstrated that old age cripples us, then death takes us. That idea of the unavoidable is present in Meek’s Cutoff as well, underlying an inescapable human fallibility that emphasises our mortality while the world and its environments remain long after our passing. The characters in Meek’s Cutoff may have thought that they were mapping a new country as they moved; the land is oblivious to them.

Ek Lief Jou. Ek Lief Kaas. Ek Lief Drank.

There are three scenes from the Kurt Darren starring romantic drama Ek Lief Jou that I will use as keys to discuss the film. I can state up front that the film is badly written and shoddily executed, and unless you’re interested in minor curiosities of contemporary South African cinema, it is best avoided. 

Darren stars as Dirk, a South African singer making it big in Belgium where he promotes a competition for women where the winner will star opposite him in his latest music video. As evidence that films seldom know what journalists really do, a hot reporter, Anna (Ilse de Vis) is assigned to travel to South Africa and to cover the competition. She’s also supposed to find some dirt on Dirk to find a ‘real’ story, something scandalous that her boss (director Ate de Jong) will approve of. Allow me to propose a drinking game: every time Anna says, “I’m a journalist, that’s what I do!”, take a shot. It will improve the viewing experience considerably, and raise it from “unbearable” to just “terrible”. 

It makes sense that we expect Anna and Dirk to fall in love somewhere along the line. What doesn’t make sense if why Dirk, who is devoid of personality but seems like a nice enough (if dim) guy, would be in a relationship with a capitalist succubus played by (former?) model Christina Storm. Also present is Andre Frauenstein, who played Goku in Eternity and now has two dreadful movies under his belt in which he co-stars with Storm. 

Scene 1: The Non-existent Waterfall 

Much of the film is set in a game lodge in Limpopo. At one stage, the characters take to the dirt roads on bicycles, and that’s how Dirk and Anna end up at a nearby waterfall, or as I refer to it, “the small stream spilling over the edge of a hill”. The filmmakers shoot the poor waterfall as if it’s the most irrelevant waterfall in the history of cinema: a small, unimpressive spot in a background so smoothed out and graded during postproduction that the entire background of trees, water and earth blend together like a failed watercolour experiment. It looks like a deleted scene from What Dreams May Come 2: Lovin' Limpopo. 

Scene 2: A Boy and His Bottle

Storm’s character Lisa Snyders and Dirk’s brother Danie have a strange relationship best explained by the psycho-dynamics of sado-masochism. Maybe because she is Dirk’s manager, little brother is willing to act submissive towards Lisa – but only to a point. While at the lodge, Lisa requests some sherry. Danie is initially reluctant to fetch her some but ends up liberating an entire bottle from the bar. He is then witness to something he was not supposed to see that involves Lisa, and to punish her pours out some of the alcohol only to fill the bottle up again with his own urine. He offers some to Lisa, but we know that he doesn’t know that she saw him pee in the sherry. She invites him to help himself to a drink, and watches him gulp down his own piss. It’s a long, bizarre scene, made even stranger by the fact that Danie has to pull his pants down to his knees to enable the bottle-filling to occur. This leads to repeated shots of Frauenstein’s rear, so much so that I began to apprehensively anticipate a reverse full frontal. We were spared that, but not the consumption of urine. 

Scene 3: The Exposed

All the main characters and some secondary ones are involved in a playful touch rugby match. Lisa does not like the fact that Anna seems to have developed a crush on Dirk, and during the game she does something to distract everyone from the Belgian journalist (“It’s what I do!”). In the midst of a line-up, as she is lifted high in the air to catch the ball, Lisa instead pulls down her blouse low enough to flash both breasts. This isn’t just a cleavage moment; for a second, you’re squaring off with the Storm nipples. It’s cheap and gratuitous, an ill-intentioned stunt that was never going to work cinematically, and provides a useful key to the film: Ek Lief Jou forces one badly written, unbearable scene after the other onto you to the point where you cannot believe what you’re seeing, and then you look away disgusted. You look away. 

Ek Lief Jou is a very bad movie, and its title phrase (a low level version of "I love you") is never even used in the film. Nor do we see, for that matter, the music video that the film uses in its premise. Indeed, much in the film is outside the frame, such as some off-screen hyenas that just fuel an already awful performance from Storm as she pretend-panics and pretend-throws rocks at them. Ek Lief Jou tries so hard to be sweet and romantic, and De Vis is likeable enough as a female interest, but in the end there’s not enough liquor (urine-infused or not) in the world to make Ek Lief Jou’s degenerate and undercooked attempts at humour palatable.