MELANCHOLIA
Trust the tale and the not the teller goes the old saying,and with good purpose too. While it may be easy to dismiss Melancholia in light of Danish enfant terrible director Lars Von Trier’s bafflingly out of taste ‘joke’ at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, those who do, would be doing a disservice to one of the most striking and elegant films of the year. A haunting and strange sci-fi tale of sisters emotionally disintegrating, bitter family ties, depression, and the end of the world as we know it; it’s an engrossing and beautiful work that stands as perhaps one of Von Trier’s best. The plot seems simple from afar; Justine (Kirsten Dunst), a young and successful career woman, has just been married to an incredibly sweet and handsome young man named Michael (Alexander Skarsgard). Their reception is hosted at a remote castle being paid for by her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her husband John (Kiefer Sutherland) where various members of her family and work colleagues mingle together. Though she seems to have everything one could want, Justine rapidly sinks into a deep depression and grows distant from her new husband and sister. Matters are not helped as her separated mother and father (Charlotte Rampling and John Hurt) tear open old wounds at the reception dinner and humiliate both their daughters. There’s also Justine’s astonishingly cruel and greedy employer (Stellan Skarsgard) who seems intent on committing her for a sales pitch before she’s even cut her wedding cake. Can this agonizingly uncomfortable social setting be the reason for Justine’s intense depression? Or could it be the mysterious rogue planet Melancholia which is passing close by to Earth and may just collide with it?
From the beginning Von Trier makes no allusion as to the outcome of the story as he opens with an astonishingly stylised prologue of Melancholia colliding into the Earth, interspersed with surreal imagery of the main characters and a Wagner score playing at deafening levels. Playing out in graceful slow motion, the images in this sequence resemble hauntingly beautiful classical artwork and seem a rapid departure from Von Trier’s usual style. He quickly reverts to this in the two distinct narrative acts of the film. Part one follows Justine as she arrives late at the wedding and bears witness to the social car crash that occurs. Von Trier made his mark in the mid nineties with the Dogma 95 movement, where he and several fellow filmmakers decided to shoot with nothing but what was provided within the environment of the shooting. No formalism and no gloss. Here he seems to bend his rules to a degree, employing a roving hand held camera that snatches out at specific incidents of lines of dialogue yet manipulates the appearance of the frame with beautiful downcast lighting that drenches the proceedings with an ominous dread that harks back to the opening scene. It marks a meeting of styles that Von Trier has been calling to in recent years the most notable examples including Dancer In The Dark and Antichrist, where he combines his realistic aesthetic with a tremendously stylised and fabricated one. Some may accuse him of betraying his former principles yet there is an astonishing visual rush of the first act that reveals Von Trier’s talent at visual style and composition.
The second act is far more intimate character piece, focusing on Claire as she cares for a near catatonic Justine and frets over Melancholia’s passing by. It’s in this section that we are reminded of Von Trier’s incredible direction of actresses. The male contingent gets its shout from Kiefer Sutherland who plays the foolish rationality of Claire’s husband well; if anything it’s disconcerting to see him so subtle after eight years of beating people senseless in 24. Yet it truly is Dunst and Gainsborg’s film to steer and they do so brilliantly. Dunst in particular shines in a way that she has not yet had to do in her career, outside of her work with Sofia Coppola. She imbues Justine with a fragile grace that barely conceals the chasms of despair that inexplicably overcome her. Her transition from emotional cripple to enigmatic foreseer of doom is loosely defined yet utterly compelling. Gainsbourg handles the reverse side of Claire excellently as well, the grim irony of the inevitable outcome reflected in her luminous screen quality. She personally reminds me of the likes of Liv Ullman, an actress whose facial expressions seem destined for the big screen.
Von Trier claims to have made the film in the midst of his own crippling depression and the process of bringing it to the screen was a catharsis for him. However much of this is true, is rife for debate. What we have is the work itself; an intoxicating, intricate and incredibly ambitious attempt to contrast the intimate with the epic. Von Trier’s detractors will almost certainly find his directorial vision too singular and his depictions of women distasteful, but rather than mere attention grabbing he has crafted an overwhelmingly powerful cinematic piece that stands as one of his finest to date. A depressive apocalypse drama that leaves you ecstatic? It’s a keeper.