Melancholia - film

It's painful to watch but interesting to think about. He creates a terrifying dystopia where no-one is really connected to each other any more, nobody properly understands each other and everybody's trapped in their own little world. 

The setting is the party after a wedding. The parents of the bride hate each other, the groom seems to have no friends or relatives, the bride has difficult relationships with both parents, the father is completely narcissistic, the mother is authoritarian and hates all conventions and disrupts the party, there seem to be many acquaintances around but no friends, her boss is her husband's best man and gives a speech where he does not mention him but announces her promotion, he has a minion trailing around her through the evening in case she comes out with an advertising tagline, her brother in law keeps reminding her about how much money he spent on the wedding and how many holes there are in the golf course, she promises to keep forever a photo her husband gives her but forgets a few minutes later, clearly showing they have not established a proper relationship... and so on. 
People converge but they never establish a bond that's sufficiently strong to be mutually nourishing, only to just about be mutually supportive at a given mutually advantegeous juncture, which is an entirely different thing. The two sisters try to mend their bond and create an intimacy in the second half of the film, but it's too little too late.

A very nice metaphor for that is the sticks that support each other to create a teepee effect under which they hide at the end of the world. It's a pathetic haphazard structure under any circumstances and (although the protagonists themselves intend it to be symbolic) is completely useless to confront the oncoming cataclysm. This final scene, where they hold hands under the teepee very nicely underlines their vulnerability, and that everything at the end of the day is about no more or less than human relations and theirs are as inept as the three sticks leaning against each other.

So the heroine is depressed, her sister is half-depressed and everyone has got issues to different degrees. They live in this suffocating, bad taste universe of wealth, in a dreadful castle that is all varnished and the most unpoetic place you could imagine (despite the lovely setting), where everything is perfectly manicured and there's no compromise with nature and where they are separated by the status their wealth gives them from any cut and thrust of life there may be out there. 

So in these kind of conditions, no wonder the end of the world will come along soon, even if it seems at times to be a false alarm. It works well as a social satire showing the dynamics that engender spiritual destruction. I'm not sure what else it could be about apart from that.

St. Pete

I always reserve the harshest words for those I'm close to. This is the best way I can think of to excuse my mainly critical words when writing about St Pete. If you've already detected from the last sentence that I could be inclined to slipping into a city-as-person metaphor, you won't be disappointed.


St Pete is so damn big and spread out, it goes on and on, with far too many empty buildings in it's centre so that its heart beats very slowly, almost inaudibly. In fact there is no centre. In Moscow, everyone knows where the centre is, and everything radiates from there. In St Pete, in the place where the centre should be, there's just water.


This absence of a centre makes people even more aware of where the real one is: for such a big proud city, it's painfully out of reach 670km south. Hence the city's strange swampy lethargy is redoubled by this lack of focus.


There are certain people you can meet who are alluring in their ability to be sometimes very charming and at others terribly indifferent. You grapple to find their heart: some solid yet tender area which, if reached, might give you a measure of the person and something worth gripping on to. But with some people it's just like St Petersburg, as you get closer to where you hope to find the heart, you find instead a kind of dark watery current that pushes along silently and can't possibly be seized.