Melancholia (2011)

LIFE IS ONLY ON EARTH AND NOT FOR LONG.

by Letitia Trent

Melancholia opens with eerie, dream-like, slow-motion scenes: A woman clutches her child as she trudges through wet ground on an immaculate golf course, another woman watches as wisps of energy leak form her fingertips, and a horse falls down slowly as the sky turns dark. Wagner’s overture from “Tristan and Isolde” plays and we gradually see an enormous, blue planet crash into earth. And that’s all before the movie begins.  

It’s often difficult to separate Lars Von Trier films from Lars Von Trier the person. While some auteurs seem divorced personally from their work (think perhaps of Stanley Kubrick, whose films bear a kind of clinical and distanced precision that don’t allow for much analysis of Kubrick as a person - beyond the observation that his films are clinical, distanced, and precise), Von Trier likes to explicitly link himself to his characters. Von Trier has claimed that the character of “She” in Antichrist (played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, with a kind of bravery I can only guess came from some very good therapy) represented his struggles during a particularly dark depression, while “Justine” in Melancholia (Kirsten Dunst) represents him, too: both “She” and “Justine” are depressives, Gainsbourg’s character consumed by guilt and Dunst’s so unable to connect to her own wedding party that she bobs from moment to moment, looking for something to pull her out of the grey mass of her own depression.

When Von Trier associates himself so closely with a film, it’s hard to take it seriously. Much like the fifty-something Robert Smith claiming that life is “really awful”, Von Trier’s claims of profound melancholy are so dramatic and adolescent, relics of some clinging to his bad boy status, that it’s hard to meet anything he says with much more than an eye roll. He also makes it hard to remember that, no matter what you think of him and his tendency for shrieking melodrama and misanthropy (misogyny, too, some claim), his movies can be astoundingly original and push actors (primarily women) to dizzying heights of emotional nakedness. By being willing to risk absurdity, Von Trier goes places that directors afraid of looking ridiculous do not. Of course, this means that his movies are often ridiculous when they are supposed to be profound.  

It would be a mistake to dismiss Melancholia based on the antics of the director or even the expectations set by Antichrist, a psychological horror movie that plays out like an opera, full of blood, body horror, and leaps of action that defy logic at every level. Melancholia is, by Von Trier standards, subtle. The first half, titled “Justine”, chronicles Justine’s post-wedding party, in which Kirsten Dunst wanders around her sister Claire’s (Charlotte Gainsbourg) opulent guest house, complete with an 18-hole golf course and stables (facts that her brother-in-law can’t help but mention—twice), ending with the ultimate loss of everything she has gained during the night.  

Even with the use of a shaky handheld camera, the opening “Justine” scenes are gorgeous. Dunst, an actress who I last loved in The Virgin Suicides and haven’t paid much attention to since, has a round, expressive, sensual face, much like Emily Watson in Breaking the Waves, and she plays the depressed Justine with flickers of life that quickly burn out, over and over again; you can see her face fall and pull downward after every moment during the wedding party that is supposed to be significant: the cutting of the cake, the dance with her husband, the dinner party and toasts. Even this momentous occasion, the one that is supposed to be her happiest, can’t elevate her out of the dullness of her internal life.  

The second half of the film, “Claire”, chronicles Justine’s subsequent breakdown (she moves in with Claire and her family) and Claire, the “stable” sister, growing increasingly frantic at the thought of losing what she loves as a planet threatens to collide with earth. Her husband says that the planet, called Melancholia (the one real cringe-worthy choice here, reminiscent of the truly awful quest for unobtainium in Avatar) will pass earth by, leaving only some fabulous pictures and memories for their young son. Claire suspects the worst, and Justine knows the worst is coming, a fact that draws her out of her depression and gives her a kind of dead-eyed serenity.

As Claire falls apart, desperately trying to hold onto her child, her life, and eventually tries to plan how to meet the end in the right way, Justine opens up to the experience, waiting calmly for it. Claire is ultimately the most sympathetic character here; she has something to lose, and watching Gainsbourg realize this and scramble to do something, though nothing really can be done, provides some of the most compelling moments in the film.  

Despite the ending, despite the film’s central thesis about the evil of the world and the relief of annihilation, I found myself hopeful at the end, not depressed or shattered or bitter, as Von Trier’s films usually leave me. Something sweet and loving has crept into the movie. In the end, Melancholia proves that Justine’s calm acceptance of the world’s end because the world is evil is far from the truth; there is enough beauty in the first eight minutes of Melancholia to disprove Justine a hundred times over, enough beauty in the orange light on an enormous sundial or the vision of two moons in one sky, enough beauty in the scene in which Claire holds Justine up over a warm bath, urging her to just try, and enough beauty in the last few minutes of the film to make us mourn the loss of the world despite the evil that Von Trier seems so obsessed with.

Letitia Trent is a writer and poet living in Arkansas. She tumbls here.