Recently in VIFF 2011 Category

"Melancholia" is now available On Demand; in theaters November 7.

Of the Four Bodily Humours -- sanguine (blood), choleric (yellow bile), melancholic (black bile) and phlegmatic (phlegm) -- Lars von Trier has probably been most closely associated with the choleric, as expressed in angry, violent, inflammatory, irritating and caustic films such as "Breaking the Waves," "The Idiots," "Dancer in the Dark," "Dogville," "Manderlay," "Antichrist"... The latter felt to me like a glossy fashion magazine's idea of a horror movie ("Evil Vogue" -- all it was missing were the scratch-n-sniff Odorama perfume ads), but von Trier¹ claimed it grew from deep inside a cocoon of depression.

"Melancholia" strikes me as a more focused and harrowing portrait of clinical depression, a glowing, black-bile-on-velvet portrait of despair so bleak that it destroys the entire planet. Two planets, in fact: one is Earth and the other (quite similar looking but much, much larger) called Melancholia, a kind of massive-planet-sized anti-matter particle which we see collide with and engulf the Earth (from deep in space) in the opening montage... and again, from a terrestrial perspective, at the end.

If Terence Malick's "Tree of Life" is, as I described it earlier in the year, "a movie about (and by) a guy who wants to create the universe around his own existence in an attempt to locate and/or stake out his place within it," then "Melancholia," by my reckoning, is a movie about (and by) a person whose depression is so inescapably great and soul-destroying that it envelops and annihilates the world. Because it has to. There's nowhere else for it to go. Also, it's important for the depressed character/filmmaker to firmly assert that the only life in the universe is on Earth, and that all of it is annihilated. Hope of any kind is not an option. Besides, anything less that than the obliteration of absolutely everything would spoil the perfection of the happy ending for von Trier and Justine (Kirsten Dunst), his Bride of Oblivion.

Pedro Almodovar's movies are so beguiled by lustrous surface textures and colors (fabrics, hair, makeup, architecture, upholstery, jewelry) that the title "The Skin I Live In" (or "The Skin That I Inhabit," as I've seen "La piel que habito" translated elsewhere) would serve well as the name of his artistic autobiography. It's a shimmering horror-farce-melodrama quilted together from scraps of Georges Franju's 1960 "Eyes Without a Face," Andre de Toth's 1953 "House of Wax" (without the one-eyed 3D) and Douglas Sirk's 1954 "Magnificent Obsession" and 1959 "Imitation of Life" -- though it doesn't stop there -- about a mad doctor, a pioneering plastic-surgeon Dr. Frankenstein named Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas, of course) whose personal life has been scarred by tragedy.

That's all I'm going to say about the plot because stitching together all the parts is so much of the pleasure of watching the movie. It begins in the middle, folds back to fill in a few mysterious spots in the patchwork, and then unpredictably pieces together the rest of the picture, bit by bit, for an absurdly touching and tentative finish.

Lech Majewski's "The Mill and the Cross" takes place inside Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel's 1564 The Way to Calvary -- as the artist observes, imagines, designs, sketches and paints it. I like to think of it as "Bruegel's 8 1/2," and I have rarely seen more absorbing and imaginative uses of blue-screen and CGI in movies.

Not that it's that simple. An article in American Cinematographer describes the film as "a three-year project that took [the filmmakers] to the Jura Mountains of Poland, the Czech Republic and New Zealand for 48 days of filming, followed by 28 months of postproduction at Odeon Film Studio in Warsaw. Production and post immersed them in digital technologies that included the first Red One to arrive in Poland, 2-D compositing in Flame and After Effects, 3-D compositing in Nuke and Fusion, and 3-D graphics in LightWave." Yeah.

Breugel (Rutger Hauer, acting in a world as fantastical and visually striking as that of "Blade Runner") wanders through the landscape of his painting, occasionally explaining his plans and methods to a patron played by Michael York. Charlotte Rampling is also featured as a model for the mother of Christ. But mostly they, and we, just watch. Breugel examines a dew-bejeweled spiderweb and is inspired to structure his painting along the same lines, with the principal event (Jesus stumbling while carrying the cross to Golgotha -- transposed to Flanders) in the center, yet surrounded by so much other activity (hundreds of other figures going about their business) that it is nearly lost, like the titular event in the artist's "The Fall of Icarus." At the upper left is the Tree of Life and the Circle of Life (the town); on the right, the Tree of Death (breaking wheel raised on a tree trunk) and the black Circle of Death (Golgotha).

Vancouver, BC, is a lovely town (not that I ever get to see any of it during the Vancouver International Film Festival, where I'm writing from) -- comparable in scenic beauty to my beloved home burgh of Seattle, and only three hours north by train. That is one dreamy train ride, too. (And Amtrak Cascades service has free Wi-Fi in coach and business class!) To me, a train is a movie on rails: the windows are like frames, the track is like the ribbon of film winding its way through the projector...

And, of course, how can you not have movie-memories whenever you board a train? "North By Northwest" is the first thing that always comes to my mind -- and "Twentieth Century," "Some Like It Hot," "That Obscure Object of Desire," "The Major and the Minor," "The Lady Vanishes"... (no, I am not going to think about "Unbreakable" or "Source Code").

Here are a few location "stills" from this year's VIFF production...

I wasn't sure how much I was going to be able to take of Markus Schleinzer's "Michael," at first, given that it begins as the "Jeanne Dielman" of Austrian kidnapper-pedophile movies. Fortunately, once the opening title appears on the screen it gets better. What I mean is, the movie starts by plunging us into the middle of a horrifying reality and treating it as mundane, reflecting the attitude of the title character (Michael Fuith), an insurance bureaucrat and sexual predator who keeps a 10-year-old boy (David Rauchenberger) locked in the basement of his nondescript, steel-security-shuttered suburban home.

We have no idea how long this has been going on. All the more horrifying, we soon see, is that for Michael it's all quite "normal," like any other family. He treats the boy as if he were his (cold, rigid, distant -- then impetuously playful) father -- sitting down with him for dinner, doing dishes with him side by side, taking him on outings to a petting zoo, decorating the Christmas tree, working with him on a jigsaw puzzle -- except that he also regularly rapes him, while keeping him imprisoned in a soundproofed, vault-like underground room which is otherwise decorated and stocked with toys like any other middle-class child's bedroom.

Maybe that's the most disturbing aspect of the film: It's not just that, beneath his flat affect, Michael is a sex criminal and a psychopath (he's a dull, mousy little man, which allows him to hide in plain sight); it's that, the sexual abuse aside, he's not all that much different from millions of other parents all over the world who, day in and day out, unthinkingly and unfeelingly treat their kids like chattel. Did I mention that writer-director Schleinzer is a former casting director for fellow Austrian aueteur Michael Haneke? Yeah, he is. You will find no sympathy for the devil here -- just icy, clear-eyed observational detachment.