The horror genre at its core is about
the fear of the loss of our own humanity. Not just the loss of life
itself, that's low-hanging fruit. We fear losing any of the things
that make us who we are – our empathy, our bodies, our
individuality, our sanity, our families and friends... If you accept
this postulate then a case can be made that Melancholie der Engel is
the ultimate horror film. Stripped down to just the core I proposed
above, the monsters in this movie are also their own victims: a
quartet of people who determine to stamp out every last vestige of
anything human within themselves.
It's not necessary to describe their transgressions here except to warn that there are a number of sequences that involve the torture and dismemberment of live animals, none of it faked. I will never argue in favor of this for the sake of art, but I won't argue against it in this review either – decide that for yourself. The central characters (practically the only ones in the film) are obsessed with death and physical corruption, with the bounds of societally structured morality, and philosophizing to rationalize their own choices. It's all very much out of de Sade...but with a difference, and it's in that difference that I find the movie both fascinating and much more disturbing.
The Mad Marquis copiously produced works of Schadenfreude, the pleasure derived from the pain of others. Schadenfreude is a conspicuous absence from The Melancholy of the Angels. Where de Sade's characters committed inhumanities with sexual glee or a cartoonishly affected torpor, the people who inhabit this movie never take any pleasure from what they do. They act out of pure anger and resentments which they nurture and indulge. One of the women cries at the brutality – she holds back from the worst of it, but pointedly never lifts a finger to stop it as she seeks the cruelty as much as her companions.
So why are they doing it?
The title of the movie is your first clue, and it's underlined by their discussions and by the meditative quality of the film's pace – nearly three hours of peace punctuated by outbursts of cruelty and body wastes. By their own testimony these people live in morbid fear of a connection to others: love and loss. They've made a conscious decision not to connect with humanity, and no transgression is too far to deaden their own capacity for empathy. They're never entirely successful, as they grieve for each other or lie together to give comfort, but they keep trying. Some of the horror lies in just how far gone they are, that their pointed efforts have now possessed them as thoughtless compulsion. Each to a different degree, they have sublimated the pain and horror by sexualizing it – one looks on the killing and disintegration of a pig at a slaughterhouse with the fervor of a newborn voyeur about to masturbate, another is turned on by a rotting animal carcass – feeling herself up and sucking at the corpse oblivious to being in broad daylight in the middle of a road.
Maybe the most potent horror, though, is in just how close they are to us. We wouldn't think of committing the acts depicted in Melancholie, but many of us have known the desire to deaden our own hearts against the brute force of depression. I've wished that I could stop caring about anything or anyone. That's another place Melancholie der Engel distinguishes itself from de Sade: his characters were two-dimensional, not even cyphers but puppets for his own fevered fantasies. Filmmaker Marian Dora treats his characters as genuine human beings driven by their own haunted psyches.
As the movie opens a few old friends gather for a sojourn to a house they frequent in a secluded valley. In that region they feel free to indulge themselves in their libertinage as a confirmation of their beliefs. Along with them are three guests and it is what happens with one of them that gives the film its power. She and a friend will be first witness to and then the subject of inhumanity. One of the two will be drawn to what she experiences. Will she ultimately reject the philosophy of her new acquaintances or embrace it? What does it take to be okay with becoming a monster?
That pig slaughter is worth mentioning as it is part of a lengthy montage juxtaposing a rape and the veneration of a decaying corpse as a religious sacrament in a temple. I musts confess watching all this in my peripheral vision and turning away when the pig was onscreen. The photography is quite accomplished, understated and often beautiful, the editing never lurid but never shying away from full disclosure, and where you might expect Death Metal the soundtrack gives us classical compositions of peace. Marian Dora isn't wallowing, he's conducting a painfully honest examination of his own soul. It may not have been fully explored – there was a thought raised by the scenes of a novitiate to the temple and the hypocrisy of a religion that venerates the corruption of the human body while treating simple joy as sin, but those thoughts never gelled in me as the film forced me forward...maybe they never really formed whole in the movie either. Meclancholie is already dealing with plenty of baggage for one movie.
People often don't know how to take de Sade. Many think his works are brilliant put-ons, which to me suggests that they reject the idea that anyone could derive sexual pleasure from monstrous acts. I'd suggest that real life and history have proven them wrong, that the truth is more complex, and that de Sade's brain really was burning up with the need to express the triggers of his lusts regardless of the intent behind his lengthy philosophical interludes. Melancholie der Engel begins and ends with the same transgression, the most outrageous of the onscreen atrocities. The newcomer will discover, and her response is the truest expression of de Sade's writings.
Recommended but only to those with strong constitutions. I saw this as a FTV for the October Challenge, and it really cast a pall over my week. It's also one I'll never forget and - after a couple of weeks - am glad I took in.
It's not necessary to describe their transgressions here except to warn that there are a number of sequences that involve the torture and dismemberment of live animals, none of it faked. I will never argue in favor of this for the sake of art, but I won't argue against it in this review either – decide that for yourself. The central characters (practically the only ones in the film) are obsessed with death and physical corruption, with the bounds of societally structured morality, and philosophizing to rationalize their own choices. It's all very much out of de Sade...but with a difference, and it's in that difference that I find the movie both fascinating and much more disturbing.
The Mad Marquis copiously produced works of Schadenfreude, the pleasure derived from the pain of others. Schadenfreude is a conspicuous absence from The Melancholy of the Angels. Where de Sade's characters committed inhumanities with sexual glee or a cartoonishly affected torpor, the people who inhabit this movie never take any pleasure from what they do. They act out of pure anger and resentments which they nurture and indulge. One of the women cries at the brutality – she holds back from the worst of it, but pointedly never lifts a finger to stop it as she seeks the cruelty as much as her companions.
So why are they doing it?
The title of the movie is your first clue, and it's underlined by their discussions and by the meditative quality of the film's pace – nearly three hours of peace punctuated by outbursts of cruelty and body wastes. By their own testimony these people live in morbid fear of a connection to others: love and loss. They've made a conscious decision not to connect with humanity, and no transgression is too far to deaden their own capacity for empathy. They're never entirely successful, as they grieve for each other or lie together to give comfort, but they keep trying. Some of the horror lies in just how far gone they are, that their pointed efforts have now possessed them as thoughtless compulsion. Each to a different degree, they have sublimated the pain and horror by sexualizing it – one looks on the killing and disintegration of a pig at a slaughterhouse with the fervor of a newborn voyeur about to masturbate, another is turned on by a rotting animal carcass – feeling herself up and sucking at the corpse oblivious to being in broad daylight in the middle of a road.
Maybe the most potent horror, though, is in just how close they are to us. We wouldn't think of committing the acts depicted in Melancholie, but many of us have known the desire to deaden our own hearts against the brute force of depression. I've wished that I could stop caring about anything or anyone. That's another place Melancholie der Engel distinguishes itself from de Sade: his characters were two-dimensional, not even cyphers but puppets for his own fevered fantasies. Filmmaker Marian Dora treats his characters as genuine human beings driven by their own haunted psyches.
As the movie opens a few old friends gather for a sojourn to a house they frequent in a secluded valley. In that region they feel free to indulge themselves in their libertinage as a confirmation of their beliefs. Along with them are three guests and it is what happens with one of them that gives the film its power. She and a friend will be first witness to and then the subject of inhumanity. One of the two will be drawn to what she experiences. Will she ultimately reject the philosophy of her new acquaintances or embrace it? What does it take to be okay with becoming a monster?
That pig slaughter is worth mentioning as it is part of a lengthy montage juxtaposing a rape and the veneration of a decaying corpse as a religious sacrament in a temple. I musts confess watching all this in my peripheral vision and turning away when the pig was onscreen. The photography is quite accomplished, understated and often beautiful, the editing never lurid but never shying away from full disclosure, and where you might expect Death Metal the soundtrack gives us classical compositions of peace. Marian Dora isn't wallowing, he's conducting a painfully honest examination of his own soul. It may not have been fully explored – there was a thought raised by the scenes of a novitiate to the temple and the hypocrisy of a religion that venerates the corruption of the human body while treating simple joy as sin, but those thoughts never gelled in me as the film forced me forward...maybe they never really formed whole in the movie either. Meclancholie is already dealing with plenty of baggage for one movie.
People often don't know how to take de Sade. Many think his works are brilliant put-ons, which to me suggests that they reject the idea that anyone could derive sexual pleasure from monstrous acts. I'd suggest that real life and history have proven them wrong, that the truth is more complex, and that de Sade's brain really was burning up with the need to express the triggers of his lusts regardless of the intent behind his lengthy philosophical interludes. Melancholie der Engel begins and ends with the same transgression, the most outrageous of the onscreen atrocities. The newcomer will discover, and her response is the truest expression of de Sade's writings.
Recommended but only to those with strong constitutions. I saw this as a FTV for the October Challenge, and it really cast a pall over my week. It's also one I'll never forget and - after a couple of weeks - am glad I took in.
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