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This article was published 15/03/2012 (5300 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Melancholia

THE best nude scene of 2011 was the stark naked Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia. In the role of a suicidally depressed new bride Justine, Dunst has a marvellous scene in the film’s second half, when the possibility of an end-of-the-world calamity emerges from a looming planetoid threatening to collide with earth.

Justine’s sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), the stable one in her fractious family, discovers her sis lying naked by a stream in uncharacteristically blissful repose, sensuously bathed in the reflected light of the deadly satellite that is threatening to kill everyone in the world.

Writer-director Lars von Trier got deliberately detestable in his last feature, the nihilist psychodrama Antichrist. But here, he employs striking imagery and his dyspeptic sensibility for more palatable purpose. Using the tropes of an end-of-the-world thriller, von Trier offers up a contrarian manifesto of existentialism: We are alone in the universe. Death is inevitable. There is no hope.

But at least there is this small comfort in ruthless realism: when the going gets depressing, the depressives get going.

Von Trier is prescribing a bitter pill with this film, but it comes wrapped in wit, sophistication and terrible beauty.

The extras on the Blu-ray edition itemize the surprising visual effects and one doc includes an astrophysicist stating in no uncertain terms that the film’s science — with regards to what would happen if a huge planetoid crashed into the Earth — is actually sound. ‘Ö’Ö’Ö’Ö

My Week with Marilyn

THE movie camera loved Marilyn Monroe, but Marilyn did not necessarily reciprocate the affection.

Her relationship with moviemaking was fraught with crippling anxiety. Anyone who’s ever watched the DVD extras of Some Like It Hot knows the stories of how MM could flub the simplest line take after take, or keep actors and film crew waiting for hours while she prepared herself emotionally for the task of getting in front of the cameras. With mixed success, My Week With Marilyn attempts to flesh out that particular film history via the movie she made just prior to Billy Wilder’s aforementioned classic farce.

The Prince and the Showgirl saw Marilyn (Michelle Williams) team with esteemed English actor-director Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) for a mismatched romance about a chorus girl who falls in love with a Prussian royal, played by Olivier.

Equally mismatched were Monroe, the sensitive, truth-seeking practitioner of Method acting, and Olivier, the old-school thespian who believed in hard work, being on time, and just pretending.

My Week with Marilyn actually focuses on Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), a young man of aristocratic family, who acted as third assistant director on the film, which meant being at the beck and call of anyone who needed him.

But as the production stalls because of Monroe’s maddening work habits, it emerges that the person who needs Colin most of all is Marilyn herself.

Monroe may have played the saucy blond minx for the benefit of reporters, but she emerges as a figure of staggering complexity courtesy of Williams’ Oscar-nominated sensitive, sympathetic performance. She was not above using her sexuality to get her way. Her spontaneous skinny-dip with Clark strikes a wonderful balance of innocent fun and deliberate sexual provocation.

But her little-girl-lost quality was more than an attention-getting act. In a scene in which Marilyn attempts to rouse herself against the prodigious sedatives she took, Williams gives a gentle suggestion of the battle Monroe would eventually lose. In manifesting Monroe’s intelligence, frailty and damaged sexuality, Williams carries all MM’s emotional weight, and she wears it well.

Pity the film never quite rises to Williams’s level. The direction by Simon Curtis is just utilitarian. HHH

Young Adult

CONSIDER this collaboration between Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman a poison pen letter to the contemporary romantic comedy.

Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) is a writer of young-adult fiction who has somehow sustained her narrow high school worldview even as she approaches her 40s. One way she manages this feat is by writing from the perspective of a high school teen queen, a role Mavis assumed with a vengeance a couple of decades earlier.

Nostalgia for that period of her life grips Mavis when she receives word via the social network that her old high school boyfriend Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson) is now the proud papa of a baby with his wife Beth (Elizabeth Reaser). The recently divorced Mavis packs her bag and her yappy little lapdog and leaves her Minneapolis high-rise apartment for her old hometown with the intention of stealing Buddy back.

She is just slightly distracted from her mission when she meets Matt Freehauf (Patton Oswalt), the guy who had the locker next to hers at school. In his teens, Matt was crippled by a group of jocks who mistakenly believed him to be gay.

Despite their miles-apart social backgrounds, the two do eventually form a bond of sorts over their tendency to numb their pain with booze and their mutual inabilities to get over their high school years.

Theron fearlessly essays the negative of the romantic heroine, self-centred and delusional, and Oswalt pings off that dynamic nicely, less inclined to delusion, but unable to help himself from falling in the thrall of the high school teen queen, even if that crown has gathered bitter mould over the intervening two decades. ‘Ö’Ö’Ö’Ö

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca