Melancholia
★★★★
(2012)
Von Trier’s apocalyptic, deeply sad and beautifully acted opera of depression begins with Wagner trumpeting over some seriously staggering images. A black, riderless horse lays down in a field below the green swish of the northern lights, Charlotte Gainsbourg carries her child through the muddy green of a golf course and Kirsten Dunst watches electricity leap from her fingers into a grey sky. Then a giant blue planet crashes into earth.
As a taste of the film which is to come it’s wild and uncompromising in its brashness, letting you know from the start that the impending doom which will arrive is final and complete. As a disaster film it’s a subtle one; focusing on and paralleling the threat of destruction of the earth with the destructive power of absolute depression. Von Trier’s suffering heroine this time is Dunst’s just married Justine. She mopes around her wedding at her brother in law’s country house unable to enjoy the happiest day of her life, her father steals spoons and calls everyone Betty and her mother is deeply and openly cynical of any kind of marriage, even her own daughter’s.
The wedding sequence, which inadvertently reminded me of Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen, is wonderfully played and acted by Dunst in particular; portraying a heavy heart often with little more than an upward glance of her eyes. Justine’s sister Claire (Gainsbourg) tries her hardest to keep the whole thing together but as disaster and failure are necessary tools in Von Trier’s films it’s giving nothing away to say the whole thing ends badly, giving way to the films second part in which Claire, her husband John (Kiefer Sutherland) and their son Leo take a rock bottom Justine into their home once more as a huge blue planet is set to pass terrifyingly close to the earth. Happy days!
Though not as immediate or savage as Antichrist, in many ways Melancholia acts as a sister film. It’s impressive introduction standing out like a sore thumb in the same way that Antichrist’s beautiful and controversial black and white overture did. Though not a complete standout of Von Trier’s wild and imaginative career, Melancholia is an intriguing and lingering disater film on a universal level. Dunst (recommended to Von Trier by Paul Thomas Anderson after Penelope Cruz dropped out) plays the depressive and ultimately calm and accepting Justine remarkably well and Gainsbourg is brilliant as always, falling apart in the film’s final moments, unable to contemplate the end.
