glittery depression

Sequins, chandeliers, neon, a floor full of dancers. The person at the centre of all that light is going under while it happens.

Justine spends her own wedding in Melancholia failing to be happy at it, while the party her sister paid for keeps going around her. A screenwriter checks into Las Vegas in Leaving Las Vegas to drink himself to death, in a neon glow shot with gritty realism. The costume changes and the feeling does not: glam rock in Velvet Goldmine, a Berlin cabaret in Cabaret, Taipei clubs at four in the morning in Millennium Mambo. Sadness in a grey room is a different shelf. Here it turns up in sequins, under the best lighting in the film, and takes a drink off the tray.