melancholia

I drive my good woman through parts of the city largely unknown to me. Her first job as a psychologist after arriving in Australia was out here in the western suburbs. Problem gamblers. She had little English then but it mattered not in Deer Park.

We turn left beyond Flemington and head for trendified-but-not-gentrified Yarraville. I remember passing the football ground in Williamstown Road as a kid on the sticky vinyl back seat of the Austin Westminster as my father drove us home to Warrnambool. But that was 55 years ago.

Built in 1938, the art deco style Sun Cinema’s neon sunburst electrifies the local nightscape. My good woman has cajoled me to see Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. Margaret loves him; David hates his use of hand-held cameras. His theme is often punishment and some say that it is punishment indeed to subject oneself to his movies.

If I must go, I will choose the cinema. For years I have wanted to see the Sun. I’ve not been to this cinema before. We get a five-minute stroll around the village before the feature begins. My good woman recognises the conspicuous architecture of a Greek Orthodox church. A dull and silent Belarus Orthodox sits in an adjoining street, bothering no one.

The movie threatens to propel me from the theatre for two-thirds of its 138 minutes, from its arty opening montage of über-slow-motion images to the endless tedium a terminally depressed bride unravelling on her wedding day.

It might be the humid end of a heatwave but the chill in the cinema freezes my good woman. I wrap my arms around myself and wonder if the theatre forget to turn down the aircon after yesterday’s 40 degrees, or did they turn it up as part of the sensual experience of witnessing the end of the world on film?

In the end I’m glad I go the distance as the film’s finale is mind-blowingly. “Wicked,” I utter as the curtain drops on the film and mankind. “I like that.”

My good woman warms up as we drive back across the Westgate and through the Burnley Tunnel to the leafy east of the city and we debrief. She is all about the protagonist’s underlying psychology and the giant metaphor of the until-recently-hidden blue planet Melancholia—von Trier 1 Astronomy 0.

Rock on.