A Sine Olivia Pilipinas production.
(International sales: Sine Olivia Pilipinas, Marikina City, Philippines.)
Synopsis: Alberta, Julian and Rina struggle hard to find answers to those questions. To be able to fight pain, they assume different personas as a coping exercise. Julian still listens to the voice/songs of his dead wife; Alberta is still looking for the body of her husband; Rina eventually gives up.
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Melancholia is an eight-hour meditation of sorts on the maddening persistence of sadness in this world, can logically be divided into three parts and an epilogue. The first part details the experiences in Sagada of Julian (Perry Dizon), Alberta (Angeli Bayani) and Rina (Malaya Cruz) as they refashion themselves into different drastic identities as part of the radical process that Julian created in order for them to cope with the losses of their loved ones. The second part is set in Manila, with Julian and Alberta living their real lives and addressing the scenarios and situations that accompany their melancholic predicament. The third part is the prologue to Julian, Alberta and Rina's prolonged tale of sadness, where deep within the forests of Mindoro, a band of leftist fighters, which includes Alberta's husband Renato (Roeder Camanag), is struggling with the psychological and spiritual torture of both practical and existential defeat while being hunted down by military operatives.
Crowned best film in Venice's Horizons section, Lav Diaz's latest madly uncommercial 7½ -hour magnum opus, "Melancholia," like 2007's "Death in the Land of Enchantment," sets a trio of survivors wandering the country in a dirge to those lost to disaster --- this time man-made. To reconcile themselves to the deaths of their leftist comrades and loved ones, two women and a man undertake a succession of role-changes as a radical form of grief therapy. But the alienation implied by their incarnations of a prostitute, pimp and nun, assumed at the pic's opening, reads as anything but therapeutic.
Diaz's now-signature B&W, high-contrast video imagery frames a more elliptical, indecipherable story than usual, as characters appear and reappear, in what may or may not be their true identities, against desolate Filipino villages and Manila cityscapes. In its extraordinary final chapter, the abstract pic climaxes with a chronicling of the last days of three men (perhaps the revolutionary dead whom the protagonists are mourning?) as they trek through primeval forests pursued by militia, madness and melancholia. Simultaneously lamenting the futility of change yet celebrating reinvention, the improbable "Melancholia" lingers on the brain.
