O meu crítico de cinema preferido, Nigel Andrews, do FT, sobre Melancholia. Rolam uns semi-spoilers:
So perhaps we need the “larger than life” after all. Lars Von Trier supplied it in Melancholia, and in reality. The director’s outrageous public remarks at a news conference on Wednesday have made him persona non grata at the festival but his film is still in contention – and if I were lord of the awards at Cannes, I would give it the top one and a few more. Here is a work of crazed and insolent ambition, its grasp equalling its reach. A weekend wedding party in a country home by the sea; a bride tormented by post-nuptial depression or worse (Kirsten Dunst); a sense of gathering social doom (worthy of the film’s Danish-directed stablemate Festen); and, to top it all, a planet called Melancholia moving towards Earth on collision course.
On the soundtrack the film begins with Wagner’s Tristan chord, that three-second revolution in music foreseen by Shakespeare: “That strain again, it had a dying fall,” the bard said; and we get the strain again, and again, first over the film’s own prelude – a series of extraordinary tableau-still images prefiguring apocalypse – then over a story that begins as caustic comedy, with strong cameos from John Hurt and Charlotte Rampling, before becoming a combination of sci-fi disaster film and Wagnerian twilight-of-the-world. There is a touch too of Shaw’s Heartbreak House. Near the close, the characters sit on the terrace exchanging resonant verities as the end of civilisation draws near.
With every reel Trier plants a new twist or adds a fresh insight. The horses in the stable whinny and then more ominously go still. The last character expected to commit suicide does just that. A moment of quiet horror takes, literally, the characters’ breath away: “It’s stealing some of our atmosphere,” explains Dunst’s science-boffin brother-in-law (Kiefer Sutherland). At the catastrophic end an unexpected story touch – small but utterly inspired – teaches us the lesson of all art and possibly all existence: that the only thing larger than life, and more long-lasting, is the power of human thought and imagination.
E Andrews comparando Árvore da Vida e Melancolia:
Though The Tree of Life was named best film – for much the same reason people are said to climb Everest (it was big and it was there) – Malick’s inflated pantheism, poetic one moment, portentous the next, has nothing on Trier’s flickering cinematic fire and bold, outrageous story-making.
The Tree of Life, delineating how life evolved on earth over millennia from the Big Bang to Brad Pitt, is a Stanley Kubrick film in religious raiment. There are soaring wonders next to crushing pieties. By contrast, Melancholia begins by taking the audience’s breath away – with its preludial tableaux of apocalypse – and ends up taking away the characters’ breath. An astonishing collision is engineered between the microcosmic, the nuances of social and psychological breakdown, and the macrocosmic, namely an earth-headed planet. Losing to Malick’s mysticism, Melancholia was consoled with a Best Actress prize for Kirsten Dunst, excellent in the film but also rewarded, we suspect, for tut-tutting demonstratively at the press conference during her director’s quasi-Nazi ramblings.
¡Nossa! A patroa não tava querendo, mas acho melhor eu ver esse filme, então.