More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
18 October
One almost inevitably knows, at some point, how long a film lasts (especially if planning eleven consecutive days’ viewing at a film festival), even if that is information that has been forgotten at the time that the feature begins.
In this case, buying a ticket on the evening and (in case things got tight beforehand - with having some proper food, for a change) asking how many minutes’ worth of trailers there were, I also got told roughly when the film would come out. (I already knew that it ran to around 2 hours 15, and what I learnt confirmed that it would not be over till past 11.00.)
In the event, after accounting for the reasons behind my early emergence to an usher whom I know, I was back in the bar by 9.45, feeling that a cup of tea and catching up on some writing were avenues that I had done well to open up to myself. So what had Melancholia done for me that was different from that pastime?
Well, it had not taken me somewhere else, and the write-up, which I had read around the end of August, had already revealed a lot about where it would go. (I have just reminded myself of what it said, and the opening sequence of the film itself placed the still from the poster in context (it had also appeared on the cover of the cinema booklet)). My reasons for not wanting to go, which I formulated when waiting for a good moment to leave, were numerous, diverse, and compelling.
Without being a fan of Wagner or his music, I know that the latter has some power, which can be appropriated, and has been many times*. Here, it seemed a lot more as if it were misappropriation, and when it started, and I registered the music’s period and what it was, I recalled that I had read a comment about the use of Wagner – pun intended, I was attuned to what I was listening to, and it gave me a disjunction (intentional, for all that I know) between the aimed-at dreaminess or other-worldliness, which, to me, Roy Andersson has achieved much more effortlessly.
Which takes me on to special effects. Fine, an Earth that does not resemble the views from space with which we are all familiar, because there is no way of knowing when what unfolds is happening, and continental drift does, after all, continue**. Not so good when one heavenly body, in close shot (with another in the background partly occluded), resembles nothing so much as a painted polystyrene sphere (I was once given one by someone studying degree-level chemistry, and sprayed it gold as the finishing-touch to a prop crown).
As to the collision between – these or other – spheres, where one (as I likened it to the usher in describing my experience) simply absorbed the other as a blancmange would a grape, I do not for certain know who, if anyone, was imagining these scenes, but it did not bode well for her (?), the film’s credibility, or my desire to see much more.
Still, one didn’t wish to be hasty, so, the suite of moving scenes being finished (including Pieter Bruegel’s The Hunters in the Snow (or The Return of the Hunters) being given a treatment reminiscent of Gilliam in the early Python shows), the announcement of whose film it is, and of the first section being ‘Justine’.
Clearly, a wedding – at some stage, though one knows that bride and groom are not conventionally in the bridal car till after the ceremony. Perhaps it is meant to be a farcical scene, but, even at this stage, the script, the delivery, Justine apologizing to Michael (rather the timid driver whose cars the pair of them have ineptly contrived to drive into a boundary stone), none of it worked. Not setting up, for me, an expectation that the subsequent frames are going to redeem what has been faulty in the preceding ones.
The script / scenario goes on, the accents that sometimes sound US, sometimes British English within the same performance are introduced (including John Hurt, as the bride’s father), and we have the wedding breakfast that no one wants: the bride’s mother (Charlotte Rampling) ably and suitably embarrassingly saying what a waste of time marriage is (except that no one seemed that awkward about witnessing it – heard it all before?); the groom not twigging beforehand that now is the first time that he is expected to make a speech (and bizarrely giving Ms Rampling another opportunity to heckle); and the bride, probably miffed that no one else seemed interested in what she has spotted in the heavens, absents herself, as and when she sees fit, with liquid-related activity such as having a bath or finding a new take on watering the fairway.
And so, unpromisingly to my mind, it went on, with Ms Rampling’s bags being dumped outside the host brother-in-law’s front doors (since she is another inappropriate and antisocial bather), only to be brought in again, and the brother-in-law agreeing that he usually makes this gesture: acknowledging it in a tone and manner perhaps directed as deliberately intermediate between farce and something more serious.
When he confronts the bride (she had already promised his wife, her sister, not to cause a scene, and then absented herself at key moments of wedding ritual) with how much the reception has cost him (though, apparently, he is immensely rich), she not only (maybe implausibly) does not know, but he (certainly implausibly) says that it will be worth it, if she agrees to be happy (which, of course, she does).
On what planet (pun intended) does anyone make any sort of pact where her side of the bargain is to be happy? Would that I had the power to choose! Yet, except, perhaps, on some higher plane relating to the influence of the planets in their orbits (or, even, from somewhere else), how was I to engage with what was being presented (and, if so, as a metaphor for what?)?
If, as the write-up suggests, the real message was that life is too short, then mine was being curtailed as I watched - and the deliberately shaky camera-work in the function room, which was just making me feel dizzy (rather than, maybe, causing a sensation of anxiety that could have been created in a less crude way), meant my well-being was being sacrificed at the same time.
* At least it wasn't Strauss and Also Sprach Zarathustra!
** Of course, it could be that it was not intended to be Earth at all, but otherwise to be some other so similiar planet that one might be forgiven for thinking that it were...
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