The 3 Rooms of Melancholia (2005)

Synopsis: Pirjo Honkasalo's 3 ROOMS OF MELANCHOLIA is a riveting meditation on war, rife with evocative, devastatingly powerful images. The Finnish director-cinematographer's indefinable film is structured... Pirjo Honkasalo's 3 ROOMS OF MELANCHOLIA is a riveting meditation on war, rife with evocative, devastatingly powerful images. The Finnish director-cinematographer's indefinable film is structured in tripartite, consisting of three "rooms," named Longing, Breathing, and Remembering. Through these vignettes, he explores the far-reaching consequences of the violent and bitter struggle between Russia and Chechnya. The first segment is set on Kronstadt, a desolate island near St. Petersburg, where young boys are sent to military school and trained to fight in Chechnya. The palpable mood of darkness, isolation, and frigidity seeps into each carefully framed image, so that even an extended shot of the boys' shoes as they march in military formation takes on an air of tragedy. From this extreme environment, Honkasalo brings us to another--the scarred city that is Grozny, Chechnya--an open wound of bombed out buildings and layers of debris. Switching to black and white film for just this middle section, the director emphasizes the stark and surreal beauty of destruction, focusing on the story of an extremely sick woman, traumatized by her husband's death in the war, who must give up her children to an orphanage. A long shot from a car window transports us into the room of Remembering, which takes place in the verdant hills of Ingushetia, the Islamic republic adjacent to Chechnya. As sheep roam and horses graze under a twilight fog, with bombs echoing in the distance, the faces of traumatized refugee children gaze into the distance, filled with both the pain of their incomprehensible loss and their determined hope for a better future. Sanna Salmenkallio's elegiac score meshes beautifully with the images, adding to the magnetic pull of this hypnotic cinematic experience. [More]

Director: Pirjo Honkasalo

Director: Pirjo Honkasalo
Composer: Sanna Salmenkallio
Studio: First Run Features