Justine opens her eyes on the end of the world in "Melancholia."

(Lars von Trier, 2011)

September 16, 2011

by Joel Crary

Earlier this year I attended two weddings within the same week. They couldn’t have been more different in size and scope. My friend Matt’s wedding was a low-key affair kept simple. The groom wore sneakers. A perfectly lovely ceremony was held at a small chapel, and the 30 or so on hand gathered afterwards at a hall for a mini-burger buffet. My brother’s wedding was a tad fancier, held at a golf and country club, with a fair chunk of change put down on tableware and juicy beef dinners and a tent to seat a hundred. It was a lovely ceremony and reception too, but I’m sure it was the more stressful of the two to put together.

The first half of Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia” takes place at a reception that looks as though it cost 10 times my brother’s. The bride, Justine (Kirsten Dunst), begins as ebullient, joking with new husband Michael (Alexander Skarsgård) about their limo driver’s inability to navigate back roads. Arriving at a luxurious estate, she nearly immediately has to begin answering to others, including sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and brother-in-law John (Kiefer Sutherland), owners of the estate and financiers of the wedding. They lose patience with her flightiness as things fall further behind schedule. Dueling speeches are delivered by Justine’s mother and father, whose failed marriage fallout guts the proceedings. Panicked, Justine begins to act out, telling off her boss (Stellan Skarsgård), sleeping with another man (Brady Corbet), and foregoing Michael’s dreams of an apple orchard.

There are truths here that a lot of movies don’t show us. Weddings are a form of idealism, yet they’re routinely fraught with imperfections. Where another director would use one as a plot hinge, von Trier is determined to make it the whole damn door and then slam it in our faces. There’s a dark humour to it, as Justine’s spirits gradually swirl down the drain, ultimately destroying her marriage before it begins and sinking her into nihilistic despondency. She becomes obsessed with a red star in the night sky – Antares of the Scorpio constellation – and returns to the estate grounds more than once to check up on it. By morning, it’s gone entirely.

The second half of the film focuses on Claire. Some time has passed, and Justine is now lost to depression, living on her sister’s charity. John, an astronomer, is joyous over a newly discovered planet dubbed Melancholia that was “hiding behind the sun.” Scientists claim the planet’s orbital trajectory will give us a eyeful of it before it passes by. Claire isn’t so sure, and we can’t blame her. She scours the Internet for doomsday predictions and can’t help but pay them heed despite John’s nearly feverish assertions that everything will be fine. When the power goes out amidst Melancholia’s approach, John chimes in that it’s perfectly natural. He’s sure of himself, to the point where he sees no need to tell Claire about the emergency supplies he’s stockpiling in the stable. Using a device fashioned crudely by their son Leo (Cameron Spurr) to judge the planet’s position, Claire figures out that something’s wrong, and then…

Well, this is von Trier, a director who routinely draws controversy through both his fatalistic pictures and ill-advised public comments. He’s never held out much hope for humanity, as is certainly evident in “Dogville,” “Dancer in the Dark,” and “Antichrist,” all films in which his protagonists are treated quite shabbily and offered little chance at discovering existential ease. I assume that his attitudes are voiced most forcibly by Justine in “Melancholia”‘s second half, taking the form of dryly delivered condemnations of people’s superficiality. He ridicules his characters’ self-absorption, at turns attacking their disbelief in their own fragility, and chastizing every fantastic “what would you do at the end of the world” scenario with a curt response.

And he does it with a lot of style. “Melancholia” offers thoroughly gorgeous imagery. Like “Antichrist,” it contains a series of slow-motion shots that beg to be stared at and appreciated, even if not fully understood in the moment. Like “Dancer in the Dark,” it finds touchstones in painting, with many shots calling back to an early scene in which Justine opens art textbooks to face the room in a moment of crisis. One of the artworks shown is John Everett Millais’ “Ophelia,” later mimicked by a shot of a fully nude Dunst on a riverbank. Another bears a striking resemblance to an ad campaign Justine is asked to deliver a tagline for. Still another calls on ideas of “the village,” somewhere out there beyond those trees, cut off from the bourgeois existence of the family, driving the point home that the end of the world cares not a whit for social class.

The film’s first half lacks the second’s strength of unease. Rather than focusing on the happiness such a lavish reception might afford a bride and groom, von Trier showcases supporting characters who can’t let the cost of things slide for the night, who can’t let old arguments and family quarrels fall by the wayside for the benefit of ceremony, and who can’t put work details aside for the post-honeymoon board meeting. I wish these scenes had more backbone; I wanted to know why, exactly, such a worry existed over Justine making a scene, why so many moments ready to boil over weren’t better contained. Von Trier often refuses to give his characters the right to speak plainly, and the resulting lack of development hurts the pacing.

Still, “Melancholia” remains a film that works hard for interpretation, delighted by its own sense of mysteriousness. The arrangement of the art books might be the key. Film is von Trier’s art, the bullhorn he uses to declare his livelihood amidst the inevitability of death, the outcry of his existentially frustrated constitution. “Melancholia” comes off as a sorting of his frustrations. I’m not sure he sees a point in the creation of his films, but that’s part of what makes them engaging – he’s obviously fascinated with art itself, the way we’ve used it over centuries to declare our own humanity, knowing full well the fruitlessness of it in the grand scheme of mortality. Even the clinically depressed Justine, when all is said and done, takes to making a “cave” to shield her family from the end, in spite of the actual good it does them.

But consider those three people in the cave. Each holds a distinct viewpoint about the human condition, and much of the credit is due to Dunst, intimidatingly game, and Gainsbourg, who has been down von Trier’s dark, twisted path before. At the beginning of the movie, they’re shown marching ever forward, each marked by their own heavenly body. I don’t think von Trier is lending more credence to one over the other, only suggesting that this is the way things are. We approach mortality with naivety, with resolution, with grace, with fear. We apply ceremonies, jobs, and wealth to distract ourselves from the inevitable and justify our livelihood. We love, but that love can be slapped with a price tag, or made a mockery of by our own past experiences. Perspective is everything, and von Trier, who calls this his most “optimistic” film, continues to offer one that’s as punishing as ever. Nevertheless, he creates the cave.

Tags: Alexander Skarsgård, brady corbet, cameron spurr, charlotte gainsbourg, filme review, kiefer sutherland, kirsten dunst, lars von trier, melancholia, Stellan Skarsgård

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