Lars von Trier's Return to Form

Melancholia Written and directed by Lars von Trier, Les Films du Losange

One of the best things about living in Paris is that films hang around in the cinema a lot longer than they do in other major cities.  In the US, you have about 10 days to catch something on a big screen; in Paris, you have about two months.

All the better to catch the final week’s run of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, released in Paris in August and winding up its run at most cinemas this coming Tuesday.

We all know by now that some films will hold up just as well on our giant television screens or even our oversized computer monitors, and so we can wait for the digital stream or DVD or however you like to get your movies.  But some films are so much better relished through the size and scope of a theater screen, through the surround-sound speaker system and through the collective experience only to be had in the company of an audience.  Melancholia is one of these films.

Melancholia is the tale of two sisters, Justine (Kirstine Dunst) and Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), and how they each deal with the news of impending doom. Most disaster films assume the disaster is inevitable, and the story is usually one of how we go about preparing to die. The difference with Melancholia—and the shot in the arm the disaster genre needs—is that we don’t know that the disaster is inevitable.  It remains a question all the way through the film, ratcheting up the tension and giving us perhaps a more quiet but far more intense ride. Lars von Trier plays with the secret of all good horror directors: the fear of the unknown.

The first half of the film is dedicated to Justine, who has just married Michael (Alexander Skarsgård), a doting, docile, and dogged young husband who seems simply happy to be by Justine’s side.  The two arrive late for their reception, hosted at the four-star hotel and golf course owned by Claire’s husband, John (Kiefer Sutherland), who doesn’t like to anyone forget how wealthy he is or how much money he’s shelled out for his sister-in-law’s reception.  The only one who doesn’t seem happy to be there is Justine herself, who finds herself drifting away time and again, bothered by an anxiety she can’t name that pulls her away from all the sensible things a young bride should do on her wedding night, and lures her into increasingly disturbing behavior that finally destroys everything around her.

The second half of the film is Claire’s, and picks up several months after the disastrous wedding reception.  Justine, now suffering acute Melancholia, comes to stay with Claire and her family, to the irritation of Claire’s husband.  He would raise more of a protest against Claire’s troubled sister, except that he’s preoccupied with a planet that will be passing by the Earth in a matter of days – an even so rare, it has the amateur cosmologist in him giddy with glee.  But Claire has a foreboding, and anxiety that – unlike her sister – she can name: she fears the planet will collide with the Earth and destroy them all.  It is such a crippling fear, she goes so far as to stash a full bottle of sleeping pills to ingest should disaster become inevitable.  And while Justine slowly recovers from her Melancholia and rejoins the family, Claire’s anxiety grows and grows, impotent—as all anxiety is—to control her own state or the path of the planet, her impotence feeding further her own fear.

The fact that von Trier cast two such disparate actresses as sisters and made it utterly believable is remarkable in itself.  But credit is also due Gainsbourg and Dunst: Gainsbourg, dark and mysterious, beautiful and not beautiful, is as fragile as a filament of steel.  Dunst, on the other hand, who is plainly and luminously beautiful, her sharp, flat American accent almost taunts Gainsbourg’s refined British tones.  And yet the two play off each other wonderfully, suggesting a lifetime’s worth of love and hate and the entire scope in between that make up a sisterly relationship.  Their performances are both noteworthy, although different in nature.  

Likewise are the cast of von Trier regulars: Stellan Skarsgård as Justine’s boss, Udo Kier as the wedding planner (genius casting, that), a jovial John Hurt and bitter Charlotte Rampling as Justine and Claire’s ineffectual parents.  And of course Kiefer Sutherland, who appears to be delighting in playing the pompous ass in this film, and it’s difficult not to be delighted with him.

But as always, it’s von Trier’s picture – his vision, his story, his fears and phobias writ large for all to see, always embodied in his female protagonists who provide a depth and examination of feeling rarely seen in film.  This is von Trier at his very best, back to his Breaking the Waves days.  Melancholia is just as moving, just as harrowing, but in a more refined, mature and precise way.

Lars von Trier likes trilogies, and it seems that Melancholia may be the second in a trilogy-in-the-making that started with his controversial Antichrist.  Both films utilize a similar opening credit sequence and the same slowed shutter speed and gorgeously lit shots as a sort of prologue (a literal prologue in the case of Antichrist), and both films deal with anxiety, panic and grief.  But where Antichrist is pornographic is its depictions of sex, love, death, and violence, Melancholia is restrained and almost delicate.  And where Antichrist’s prologue provides us the history of recent events in the characters’ lives when we pick up the story, Melancholia’s prologue simply gives us sharp, almost surreal images that ominously border nightmare logic.  Evoking some of the video work by artist Bill Viola, the jarring intensity of the opening shots effectively unsettle the viewer.

And that sumptuous cinematography alone is worth the ticket price, by the way: every shot is meticulous and breathtaking. But the real reason you should rush right out and see this before it leaves cinemas is for the ending. I won’t ruin it for you, but believe me: you don’t want to miss it. And you don’t want to see it on a small screen.

May 2011, Vingt Paris Magazine

Abso-fucking-lutement!

Eddie Izzard: Stripped - Tout en francais ! June 2011 at Theatre-de-Dix-Heures

My French sucks.  Sure, I get by on a day-to-day basis and have, on occasion, engaged in polemiques over religion, history, linguistics and government, but have been quietly informed on more than one occasion that at a certain point in my argument I am no longer constructing actual sentences but merely allowing a string of tenuously related French words to fall out of my mouth and have generally stopped making sense.  This is true whether my polemic is lubricated by wine or water.

My comprehension of French is not much better, so it was with some trepidation that I bought my ticket for Eddie Izzard’s opening night in Paris for his show Stripped – Tout en francais! Mr. Izzard’s French is certainly better than mine, but it’s not perfect and his questions to the audience to correct verb tense, noun gender, sentence structure and the occasional oh fuck-it moments are endearingly familiar to anyone who has gone through the rite of passage of butchering, questioning but nevertheless plowing ahead with less-than-perfect French.

Slipping in a few bon mots en franglais here and there (abso-fucking-lutement!), he delighted both francophones and anglophones with his fantastical universe of driving velociraptors, cavemen named Steve (a wonderfully ludicrous name in French, by the way), miscommunication among the ancient Romans and mammoths in the Marais. While the words that fell out of Mr. Izzard’s mouth were of his own out-of-the-box logic, they made perfect sense as he shared his always intelligent, insightful and highly entertaining observations on atheism, world history, the birth of language and… well, he doesn’t talk about the government, although he does point out the more diabolical points of iTunes with the same appreciation for nonsense that French bureaucracy often inspires.

We were lucky enough to have a little chat with Mr. Izzard after the show and he was, understandably, pumped up after a successful opening night.  He was thrilled that the audience was about 70% francophone, and shares his plans to conquer the world as only a language geek might, by continuing the show in German, Spanish, Italian, Arabic and, possibly, Dutch.  I made that last one up, but Mr. Izzard’s energy and enthusiasm for language, history and the absurd make him a perfect fit for Paris.  Vive la comédie anglaise, tout en francais!

June 2011, Vingt Paris Magazine

Only In Dreams

Claude Cahun at Jeu de Paume 24 May - 25 September 2011

“I was right: …art, life: it amounts to the same thing. It belongs to the one who goes the farthest in the dream—or in the nightmare.”

--Heroines, by Claude Cahun

It is generally accepted nowadays that the Surrealists were pretty much a boys-only club.  Girls were allowed primarily only as muses, the female body depicted as dangerous and ideal.  Except to Claude Cahun, a photographer, collagist and writer who existed only as a minor player on the fringe of the movement until the mid-1980s, when Cahun’s work was rediscovered and widely celebrated, Cahun’s photographs on a par with Man Ray, and collages equal to Max Ernst  Unlike Man Ray, Ernst and even Breton, Cahun’s work investigates the female body as a jumping off point to ask larger questions about gender, identity and societal definitions of self.

What made Claude Cahun different from the boys in the club is that she was actually a woman.  Born Lucy Schwob in 1894 to an established intellectual family in Nantes, Lucy was already asking questions about gender and identity by the time she met illustrator Suzanne Malherbe, her lifelong collaborator and partner, at the age of 15.  They published their first collaboration, Vues et Visions, in 1914 and Schwob changed her name to Claude Coulis, a name that served for its androgyny and that she should finally settle into Claude Cahun.  

As early as 1912, Cahun was dressing up, dressing down, shaving her head and eyebrows or pouting in pencil-thin eyebrows and full lips for the camera, her self-portraits playfully questioning and challenging contemporary ideas gender and societal definitions of identity as she embarked on her lifelong pursuit to capture the uncapturable Self.

The Claude Cahun exposition at Jeu de Paume is the most comprehensive retrospective of Cahun’s work in 16 years, and includes , including original letters, political tracts, writings, collages and, of course, photographs.  Notable not only for their subject matter -- pre-dating Yoko Ono, Cindy Sherman and even David Bowie by presenting that artist as the work of art – the photographs are also important for their high level of technical prowess as well.

In 1919, Cahun and Malherbe moved to Paris and met, finally, the Surrealists – a group she at once identified with but remained only the fringes of. Cahun herself claimed to be “born a Surrealist” which, judging by her early writings, illustration and photography, appears to be less a boast than a simple statement of fact.  Cahun produced a large body of writings, photography, drawings and collage, sometimes on her own and sometimes with Malherbe, all the way up to the German occupation of Paris.  She was profiled in the Chicago Tribune European edition (who only referred to her as Ms. Schwob), worked with Breton, Henri Michaux and Robert Desnos and was, as Breton called her, “one of the most curious spirits of our time,” although it is unclear if he meant inquisitive or bizarre.

Frustrated with the Resistance (or lack thereof) in Paris, she and Malherbe retired to Jersey, only to find the island occupied by the Germans whom they dutifully harassed with yet more performative art in the form of subversive poetry and tracts they gleefully stuffed into soldiers’ pockets, through open car windows and into empty cigarette cartons to be discovered by greedy soldiers.  They were eventually captured, imprisoned and sentenced to execution, saved at the last moment by the ending of the war.

While a serious artist, Cahun’s native sense of humor persists throughout all the works on display, as it did throughout her life, where even near the end of her life, her favorite on-going project was to be led around a Jersey graveyard blindfolded by her cat on a leash.  

Her early photographs display her wry humor as well: Cahun as a golden Buddha, her head shaved and masculine while her undeniably feminine legs emerge from the folds of her holy robes; Cahun as effeminate body builder, the words “I am in training don’t kiss me” scrawled across her chest; Cahun as femme fatale, as Pierrot, as her father, as a young boy, as a specimen, her disembodied head on display in a glass vitrine.  

And this perhaps is the best representation of Cahun, or how Cahun saw herself: specimen, on display, to be preserved, studied, explored.  

Since her “rediscovery”, Cahun has since been claimed as a mascot for feminist and lesbian groups, but to hold her as only relevant to those groups is a disservice to a woman who explored the relationship between homosexuality and narcissism, who stated “neutral is the only gender that always suits me”, who pursued photography, collage, writing, poetry, acting and drawing with equal fervor; a woman who quite doggedly defied every definition narrower than “artist”.  But she went farther still, her entire life an unrelenting, exhausting pursuit of self, that ever-changing, fluid, goassamer entity that exists only in nightmares… or dreams.

May 2011, Vingt Paris Magazine