This week I’ll be highlighting a filmmaker whom I have a much more complex relationship with than previous entries: Lars von Trier. Anyone who knows me know that I’m often hot and cold on his work, feeling that at his best, he’s transcendent, and at his worst, he’s insufferable. His last three films, the self-titled “Depression Trilogy”, often serves as a perfect example of this quality, producing a literal mixed bag of thematic exploration, and more or less capture everything that he believes in. Those three films are Antichrist, Melancholia, and Nymphomaniac.
Antichrist is a film of almost incomparable beauty, shot by Anthony Dod Mantle under von Trier’s precise direction, chronicling a couple’s retreat to a cabin in the woods after the death of their child. Von Trier is concerned with depression brought on by the “loss of another” here, and makes one hell of a case for why your spouse shouldn’t be your therapist. Make no mistake, this is a horror film, the kind of surrealist one that we almost never see anymore, far more concerned with the terrors that lurk within a psyche so damaged by trauma that a person willingly surrenders themselves to the darker tendencies of humanity.
For a film so publicly decried as being controversial, very little of what Von Trier actually puts on screen actually strikes me as shocking here. Sure, there are certain scenes that are uncommonly graphic, both of sexual and violent nature (sometimes both at once), but it’s never without purpose. The thematic undercurrent is thoughtful enough to characterize the film as being provocative, but never in an empty fashion. Rather, von Trier wants to explore what happens when guilt and grief drive a person to madness, always maintaining a level of empathy amidst the honestly terrifying implications. It deserves far more thoughtful consideration than many were willing to give it, if for no other reason than to understand how the provocative visual language serves a much more interesting dramatic series of ideas.
It’s fascinating to me that von Trier’s follow-up, Melancholia, was so much more well-received by critics than Antichrist, whereas I find myself much more conflicted on the film than most. The film is presented in two distinct parts: the first follows a woman’s wedding night turning to utter shit by her increasingly crippling depression, brought on this time by “the loss of will to live”; and the second part, which switches POV to the woman’s sister, who is trying to help her deal with her depression while also fretting about a recently discovered planet orbiting the earth in a “dance of death” that may or may not result in our world’s utter obliteration. So you know, nothing to worry about.
As I mentioned before, von Trier has this tendency to be transcendent, but also completely banal. Melancholia has always had me struggling to reconcile this paradox, because in both halves of the film, the sheer prowess of filmmaking on display is breathtaking, but he doesn’t seem to know when he’s hit the thematic sweet spot, going on instead to beat his point to death. That isn’t to imply that the film isn’t worthwhile. Quite the contrary, it’s often stunning to watch unfold, particularly in the wordless moments of reflection that von Trier allows his two protagonists. As a meditation on the worth, or lack thereof, of life as we know it, the film soars. As an allegorical study of depression, it stumbles a bit when it starts to lose empathy for Justine. Von Trier seems at odds with how he wants to portray her, particularly when framing the film from her POV. More often than not, he finds a way to ground her in a compassionate way, but a few character choices strike me as rather cold both to her, and to the audience. But when the film finds that sublime area, it’s more than worthy of consideration.
If nothing else, it features one of the most stunning endings in recent memory.
Finally, we come to Nymphomaniac, which deals with depression brought on by the “loss of self”. This four-hour epic details the life of Joe, a self-diagnosed sex addict, as she chronicles her sexual encounters to a stranger who saves her from a savage beating in an alley. Inexplicably split into two volumes for distribution purposes, it’s simply one film with an arbitrary intermission, and should be addressed as such. Exhibition troubles aside, this is a film I find myself not entirely sure how to address.
In many ways, it’s Lars von Trier’s magnum opus, laying out every single cinematic pre-occupation he’s ever had on the table into one big spread of thematic smorgasbord. It’s an absurdist comedy, a pretentious wank (pun very much intended), and a meaningful statement all at once, and in a lot of ways, never seems to land on any of those things entirely. What it does excel at, even with von Trier’s signature sledgehammer subtlety, is the way depression robs a person of their identity, and the psychological damage that does. But is it an evolution or a regression for von Trier? There are arguments to be made for both, and it’s certainly more complex than any binary definition allows for (I’ll be exploring this further down the road). What I do know is that it’s as fitting a conclusion to the “Depression Trilogy” as one could hope for, and worth watching just for how out of control Uma Thurman is in it.
