This will perhaps be less of a critical look into this than the previous Denis' I've written of as I find this film to be perhaps a bit too overwhelming for me, personally. I can still recall the first time I watched this, during my edgy "New French Extremity" and "South Korean New Wave" (or whatever the 2000s were referred to as) period and not getting this at all. It was too slow, felt like it's style meandered too much, the minimal amounts of dialogue, the discontinuous editing style - it was just too "arty" for me, at the time anyway. I had a very similar reaction towards Antonioni's The Passenger the first time I watched that film. It took years for me to return to Denis. I believe it was one of her later films that I finally picked up her again and even then it took watching more of her until she finally clicked with me.
It didn't help that at the time I my perspective of "NFE" was colored more by films like Irreversible, Martyrs, and Frontier(s) than the work of filmmakers like Grandrieux or the early work of Bruno Dumont. I expected gore and torture and cruelty the, in a phrase, "pushed the limits," of what I could handle. Not that I could ever label myself as a gore-hound, but when you approach a work like this with that kind of style in mind, you're bound to be disappointed in one form or another, as I was. The air of sadness overwhelms throughout, and melancholia wasn't what horror was about to me, at that time. It lacked the kind of visceral energy, the propulsion that other films I was watching at the time utilized in order to build up tension and keep me engaged.
I could not comprehend that horror was meant to do anything beyond scare you or to instill fear inside of a viewer. And to achieve this outside of gore or some sort of violent act seemed absurd to me at the time. But like all things, we age and our tastes (hopefully) develop and are refined. The melancholia was revealed to me and I understood it's vantage, at least as well as I can understand anything that is. The longing for something, someone, that understands you, but you know that when you do reveal yourself to them fully, the result will only be pain - perhaps just for you, at worst, for both. There is no solution where both parties wind up happy. And the hunger is never satiated.
There's a disenchantment with the world around oneself. Vincent Gallo's Shane Brown character is a man in search for a cure for what he craves. Money, love, sex - these are all things that one can obtain quite easily. It's not difficult to acquire things that society tells us will make us happy, these things will supposedly solve all our problems. If so why are we left empty when we have them? What is it that drives us to seek these things we know bring us no pleasure beyond the moment we're engaged in them. We are but vampires walking around in search of the next fix. In the dark we shall meet; and in the dark only one of us shall leave.
I desire to be engulfed by you, to become subsumed in you. I know we are no good but we shall forever be intertwined. Our desire and pain, twisted together. There is beauty in this harmony but there is no stopping the eventual collapse. Caught in a vice-grip of each other, this is a suffering bound to last a lifetime. Hence why one must burn it down, in hopes of starting anew - and knowing that the result will be the same. Existing - it's trouble every day.
I would be remiss to not mention the score by Tindersticks. To this day it is probably still my favorite score they've done for Denis. A beautifully tender but minimalistic series of pieces that sound so loud in a film so quiet. Erotically tinged danger that builds until that silence returns. A climax that rings out so the sound of nothing overwhelms at the conclusion. The lilting title-track makes my eyes swell every time I hear it.
