Movie: Melancholia (Lars von Trier, 2011)
Melancholia begins with a long montage of fragments we'll see later in the film. These fragments, such as a bride floating in a lake, a woman carrying a child, a horse falling down, the planet 'Melancholia' bumping against Earth, unfold in extreme slow motion and are set to Richard Wagner's music. The images have a quite painterly (though also highly digitalised) look, which is only further emphasised when von Trier inserts actual classical paintings in his montage. It is an opening that self-consciously invites comparisons to 2001: A Space Odyssey and other classics of its ilk which took the time to announce their grandiosity with epic epilogues. Melancholia falls short of those films, but is a far bettter and more interesting film than I expected.
This is only the second von Trier I've seen after The Idiots (which I remember liking quite a lot). Based on his reputation I was expecting self-flagellating misery porn expounding the virtues of suffering. It's very much not that; the end of the world as a metaphor for/representation of depression is admittedly a bit overwrought and belabored, but the film works incredibly well on a literal level. In the first part, 'Justine', as a sly comedy about the most miserable wedding ever, and in the second part 'Claire,' as a surprisingly realistic look at how we might react to a potentially apocalyptic natural phenomenon. I do have one other misgiving; I understand that the sound design fits von Trier's ideas, but the often deliberately muffled dialogue does at times work against the film.
It's a bit of a cheap 'see me be a punk rebel' move to follow the carefully composed opening montage with a shot of the film's title, badly scribbled on an insignficant piece of paper, but it does set the right mood for the rest of the film, which never allows you to be quite sure of how serious you should take it. Especially once the title card is followed of a shot, not in slow motion, of a limousine driving at such a snail's pace on a country road that it might as well belong to the opening montage. The limousine gets stuck in all kinds of different ways, making Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and Michael (Alxander Skarsgard) late at their own wedding party, which mostly upsets the wedding planner. He won't have a better time the rest of the night.
Everyone at the wedding knows that Justine is depressed, and has been for some time, but nobody knows how to help her. The hosts of the wedding,Justine's sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and brother-in-law John (Kiefer Sutherland), demand Justine hold it together, and are working hard to keep up appearances when she doesn't. At the same time, Justine tries to fake it, while the rest of the wedding guests also know exactly what's going on, and are equally trying to keep a straight face. And so, the wedding party becomes a slowly moving train wreck everybody knows is coming, but is powerless to stop. This results in a lot of passive-aggressiveness, fake smiles, aimless moving around, and pent up tension slowly coming to the forefront, with Kiefer Sutherland giving the most unexpected performance, channeling some of his dad's inttelectualized sardonic arrogance. Kirsten Dunst is of course great too, working together with von Trier to depict Justine with compassion, understanding, and some mischievousness. The film suffers with Justine, but also enjoys that her condition has everyone around her flailing about, being lost and confused.
The second part is filled with more dread, and focuses on Claire who fears that the Earth's encounter with planet Melancholia won't end as well as the scientists have calculated. Her husband John is one of those scientists, and keeps comforting her that Melancholia will indeed be just a 'flyby'. But the scientists also know that if they have miscalculated something, it would be the apocalypse. The inage of Melancholia appearing at the horizon like a rising sun is spectacular and surreal; everything else is handled matter-of-factly. The appearance of Melancholia may be strange, but is seen as an event that can be explained and followed scientifically and rationally. It the world ends because of Melancholia, it won't be an inexplicable force, a mysterious act of God, or some alien being that finishes it, but something that can be understood, studied and empirically experienced by ordinary people. It's the most realistic and palpable depiction of the (potential) apocalypse I remember seeing. We don't see mass panic, no sensationalist news reports, no crazy end-of-the world parties, no prophets declaring the end of times. Just Claire going to a fake news website showing a graph explaining why the scientists expecting merely a flyby are wrong, actually.
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