Reviews

The film is about a spoiled, racist brat surrounded by feckless, over-the-top incompetent adults. The adults are so beyond caricature in their incompetence that it utterly fails to be funny. It is ostensibly a black comedy, but the humour, for me at any rate, consistently fell flat. While it at least avoids the vulgarity of the very worst Hollywood comedies, they at least have the decency to be brief. This meanders pointlessly, with uninteresting subplots added seemingly for no reason other than padding. Also, jokes that weren't funny the first time are repeated again and again. Finally, none of the characters are particularly interesting nor sympathetic. For me, this quickly fell into "I don't care what happens to any of these people" and once that happens even murder utterly fails to be interesting.

This film's greatest weakness is its failure to establish psychologically consistent, credible characters. More than once, the dialogue and the acting seem to establish something about a character, and that character development is then contradicted, out of the blue, by the character's actions, actions that make no sense. Without giving spoilers, it can be said that various characters' (Justine, her nephew, Justine's brother-in-law) actions are not psychologically consistent or realistic.

Furthermore, and adding to the disappointment, the cinematography is far less impressive than in Antichrist, for example - indeed, the acting's calibre, which is Melancholia's strong point, isn't enough to save this film. The problems with character development made it impossible for me to become invested in the characters, and without that, the film can have little impact, despite the tragedy it deals with.

The film is set in Mexico in 1903, during the final decade of the brutal stability brought about by the Díaz dictatorship, and follows a sergeant, his subordinates and various associated characters, such as Melba, the sergeant's partner. It is perhaps tempting to view the characters and the dynamics of the film in terms of historical events, in which case the message sent is a rather pessimistic and fatalistic one. To escape or at least alleviate the misery of their lives, some of the characters turn to hedonism, taking what pleasures they can get; others seem to at least find some structure in their lives in blind obedience to authority. Others do undermine authority in small ways, but for their own personal motives and usually in a criminal fashion, motivated for instance by greed and resentment, or by stupidity and pride. There is no sense of any wider social movement or awareness, which is perhaps in itself, if we view it as a historical allegory, a devastating critique of the Revolution that overthrew Díaz a few years later. A significant scene in this sense is when there is some recruiting to fight against the Yaqui people, who had revolted, to which the regime had reacted by sponsoring a full-blown genocide. Not a single character questions it in any way, or even takes much of an interest apart from discussing the applicable wages, apart from one soldier who is incensed against the Yaqui.

The acting is excellent, the recreation of the time and place rings very true, but the greatest challenge, as well as the greatest reward in this film, lies in the language. It seems to have put considerable effort into re-creating the slang of the time and place (making the original dialogue a challenge even for native speakers) and the result rings very true. The dialogues are both full of errors that reflect the uneducated background of most of the characters (some of whom are unable to sign their names; at the time, about 3/4 of the Mexican population was illiterate), and use language in a very creative, ingenious way reminiscent of Shakespeare's English (particularly some of Iago's lines in 'Othello,' for example).

This film has a persistently artificial feel to it that at times serves it well and at times is a hindrance - it sometimes serves to highlight the hypocrisy and corruption of the milieu and give the central characters a decadent air, but at times it interferes with character development, as it interferes with our understanding of the characters. The plot itself is rather conventional but is essentially an excuse to dissect a certain milieu. The most interesting character is in my opinion very underrated: the mayor's stepdaughter, who is clearly intelligent, somewhat sombre but decidedly not bookish. She is the sole character that does not seem motivated by purely selfish, fairly conventional motives (money, political ambition, boredom, sexual desire, etc), making her motivations harder to fathom. She is the only character with any real mystery about her; it's hinted she has some kind of fascination with death, and she makes a surprising comment related to the role of women, all of which add to her ambiguity as a character.

This is by far the worst Chabrol film I've watched; he is normally I director I admire but this film is dull, vapid, poorly edited and showcases all the worst stereotypes about French cinema. The characters are completely lacking in depth (and contrived oh-so-shocking revelations don't change this) and universally uninteresting; Depardieu in particular is very good at acting pedantic, but manages to convey precious little else. Actually, none of the characters are likable and most are unsympathetic without being interesting.

The central plot is about a crime that gets rapidly duller as the film progresses; from the start it's not particularly fascinating (because none of the characters involved is sympathetic or interesting in his own right, it fails to answer 'why should I care?'), but the central crime story becomes increasingly prosaic and occasionally ludicrous.

This film has far too many subplots, none of which are even remotely interesting and they drag on and on ('brevity is the soul of wit' applies here) and are only marginally relevant to the central plot. You keep hoping one of them develops into something interesting, but it never happens. It has the feel that Chabrol filmed lots of subplot footage in case it was useful and in the end just decided to shove it all into the final product.

Unless this film is somehow meant as a parody of the most pretentious French cinema or some other sort of in-joke, it is an astonishing failure by an otherwise very good director.

This is a pretentious film, with its Biblical title, and multiple Bibical allusions ('Eden,' to name an obvious one) - this distracts from the actual central drama and its psychological aspects. The very directness of some scenes also reeks of a director that is showing off how liberated or daring he is; some scenes are meant to shock for the sake of shocking, while pretending to be profound. Still, it's very effective at creating a mood of constant unease and the shockers are at least shocking.

The best aspect of the film in my view is the portrayal of nature as something profoundly evil, characterised by brutality, death and madness - a refreshing break from the trite Bambi-style portrayal of nature as harmonious and benevolent. I view nature as brutal and amoral but not evil, but I still find it an interesting take, achieved mostly (though not entirely) with realistic nature scenes, which adds to its effectiveness.

The film has been criticised as misogynous - my take on it is that this is about one particular woman, and about embracing an extreme misogynistic world-view to both get attention and escape personal responsibility. It does not follow it's meant to apply to all women.

Despite the title, it is possible to view this film as entirely non-supernatural and about insanity and/or (worldly) evil, largely depending on whether certain scenes are interpreted as real, hallucinations or allegories of what is going on inside the character's mind.