Melancholia (Lars von Trier, 2011)

Cast: Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Alexander Skarsgard, Kiefer Sutherland, Cameron Spurr, Charlotte Rampling, John Hurt, Stellan Skarsgard, Brady Corbet, Udo Kier. Screenplay: Lars von Trier. Cinematography: Manuel Alberto Claro. Production design: Jette Lehmann. Film editing: Molly Malene Stensgaard. 

This is the way the world ends in Lars von Trier's Melancholia: with a bang, as a rogue planet collides with Earth, and a whimper from the terrified Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) as she and her small son, Leo (Cameron Spurr), and more resigned sister, Justine (Kirsten Dunst), await the cataclysm. What this eschatological moment has to do with the dysfunctional wedding reception that constitutes the first half of the film is something for us to ponder. Or not, because there are many who dismiss the film as yet another of von Trier's perverse and enigmatic fables that have something to do with human passion and cruelty but defy explication. Is von Trier just playing around with the science fiction genre, the way he played around with the horror movie genre in Antichrist (2009) and the skin flick in Nymphomaniac (2013), the other two films that constitute his trilogy about depression? Or is it art for expiation's sake, a work that by existing defies its own nihilism? The debate continues. 

Ismael's Ghosts (Arnaud Desplechin, 2017)

Ismael's Ghosts (Arnaud Desplechin, 2017)

Cast: Mathieu Amalric, Marion Cotillard, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Louis Garrel, Alba Rohrwacher, Lászlo Szabó, Hippolyte Girardot, Jacques Nolot, Catherine Mouchet, Samir Guesmi. Screenplay: Arnaud Desplechin, Julie Peyr, Léa Mysius. Cinematography: Irina Lubtchansky. Production design: Toma Baqueni. Film editing: Laurence Briaud. Music: Grégoire Hetzel, Mike Kourtzer.

Even people who know Arnaud Despechin's films better than I do seem to agree that Ismael's Ghosts is something of a mess, a series of scenes and incidents that are sometimes brilliant in themselves -- such as the tantrum that the elderly film director Henri Bloom (Lászlo Szabó) throws while boarding a flight to Israel, where he's to receive an award -- but don't cohere enough to make thematic or emotional sense. Just the fact that we have characters named Bloom and Dedalus should be enough to clue us in that we're dealing with a literary imagination as well as a cinematic one: There's also the reappearance of a woman though to be dead whose name is Carlotta, an allusion to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958). As we sort out the various relationships -- who's married or related to whom -- we also have to figure out what one segment has to do with another -- why, for example, do we sometimes seem to be in the middle of a spy thriller and the next we're examining the love life of a filmmaker? Eventually, we realize that some scenes are from the film Ismaël Vuillard is directing, but what that film has to do with his domestic and creative troubles is another matter. Nevertheless, it's entertaining enough to watch actors like Mathieu Amalric, Marion Cotillard, and Charlotte Gainsbourg do their thing, so if in the end you don't particularly feel compelled to piece it all together, there's still been some well-spent time.

Antichrist (Lars von Trier, 2009)

Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg in Antichrist

He: Willem Dafoe
She: Charlotte Gainsbourg
Nic: Storm Acheche Sahlstrøm

Director: Lars von Trier
Screenplay: Lars von Trier
Cinematography: Anthony Dod Mantle 
Production design: Karl Júlíusson
Film editing: Åsa Mossberg, Anders Refn

Any film that begins with a toddler climbing to an upper-story window and falling to his death while his parents have graphically photographed sex has a lot of work cut out for it. Unfortunately, Lars von Trier isn't up to the task he sets for himself: Antichrist is morally and intellectually confused in ways that even arch-provocateur von Trier's earlier films haven't been. It plays like a horror film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (if Tarkovsky had been a less grounded and imaginative director), which shouldn't be surprising since the film's credits include a "horror film researcher" and is dedicated to Tarkovsky, whose film The Mirror (1975) reportedly served as a direct inspiration for von Trier. Antichrist became a cause célèbre when it was shown at Cannes, where some people reportedly fainted and others walked out, but Charlotte Gainsbourg went on to win the best actress award. American critics were similarly divided, with A.O. Scott of the New York Times calling it "ponderous" and "conceptually thin and ... dull" but Roger Ebert praising both the commitment of the actors and the director's drive "to confront and shake his audience more than any other serious filmmaker -- even Buñuel and Herzog." Some critics had it both ways, praising it with reservations: Tom Long of the Detroit News labeled it "probably the best film ever that you'd recommend to absolutely no one." Ebert's measured praise seems to me the most appropriate: Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe are the main reasons anyone who is fascinated by the art of acting should see Antichrist. They throw themselves into near-impossible roles, full of contradictions and sometimes misconceived ideas about psychotherapy and the relationship between men and women, and yet manage to overcome the limitations of the screenplay. And while I would never mention von Trier in the same breath as Tarkovsky or Buñuel (Herzog, maybe), I can't help feeling that there is an immense talent at work in his films. Antichrist was born out of von Trier's period of clinical depression, and while that's not enough to excuse the film's incoherence, it certainly makes it more interesting as a personal work of art.

21 Grams (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2003)

Melissa Leo and Benicio Del Toro in 21 Grams

Paul Rivers: Sean Penn
Cristina Peck: Naomi Watts
Jack Jordan: Benicio Del Toro
Mary Rivers: Charlotte Gainsbourg
Michael: Danny Huston
Marianne Jordan: Melissa Leo

Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Screenplay: Guillermo Arriaga
Cinematography: Rodrigo Prieto
Music: Gustavo Santaolalla

An egg is an egg no matter how you scramble it. You can whip it into a meringue or a soufflé or an omelet, but it still retains its eggness. The same thing, I think, is true of melodrama: There's no disguising its improbabilities and coincidences, its short cuts around motive and characterization, its intent to surprise and shock. Mind you, I don't have anything against melodrama. Some of my favorite films are melodramas, just as some of our greatest plays, even some of Shakespeare's tragedies, are grounded on melodrama. It's just that you have to approach it without pretension, which is, I think, the chief failing of Alejandro González Iñárritu's 21 Grams. The melodramatic premise is this: The recipient of a heart transplant falls in love with the donor's widow, who then persuades him to try to kill the man who killed her husband. It's the stuff of which film noir was made, but Iñárritu takes screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga's premise and scrambles it, using non-linear narrative devices -- flashbacks and flashforwards -- and casting an unrelievedly dark tone over it, as well as reinforcing a pseudoscientific message in the title, which is explicated at the end of the film. In 1907, a Massachusetts physician named Duncan MacDougall tried to weigh the human soul: He devised a sort of death-bed scales, which would register any loss of weight at the moment a patient died, thereby demonstrating to his satisfaction -- if not to the medical and scientific communities -- that the weight of the soul was approximately three-quarters of an ounce, or 21 grams. I suspect that Arriaga and Iñárritu meant the allusion to this bit of nonsense metaphorically, but it doesn't come off that way. By the end of the film, we are so weighed down with the misery of its protagonists that it feels like sheer bathos. This is not to say that 21 Grams is a total loss as a film. Iñarritu is one of our most celebrated contemporary directors, with back-to-back Oscars for Birdman (2014) and The Revenant (2015) to prove it. I just don't think he's found himself yet, but has become too caught up in narrative gimmicks that prevent him from delivering a completely satisfying film. There is much in 21 Grams to admire: The performances of Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Benicio Del Toro, and Melissa Leo are as fine as their reputations suggest they would be. The narrative tricks are done with great skill, especially with the aid of cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, who uses color to make each of the narrative segments distinct from the others, so that when the film cuts from one to another, the viewer feels better oriented. And there's no denying the emotional impact of the film as a whole. It could hardly be otherwise, given the pain suffered by the protagonists: Cristina, who lost her husband and her two little girls; Jack, the ex-con who accidentally killed them and believes that it was all because Jesus wanted it to happen; and Paul, who finds his chance at a new life marred by knowledge that it was at the expense of other people's happiness. But in the end, all of this suffering is off-loaded onto us without any compensatory feeling of having been enlightened by it.