tederick | 9 Dec 2011 | 1,042 Views | 4 Likes | 0 Dislikes

Review: Melancholia

Clinical depression becomes a useful form of apocalyptic preparation in Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, a film in which the world ends decisively in the opening stanza, assuring us that no matter what happens between the dimming of the house lights and their inevitable rise, there ain’t no gettin’ out of this one. With its Wagnerian prologue of celestial bodies smashing into one another, and ultra-ultra-ultra-slow-mo actresses trudging vainly through livid nightmares that would make Take Shelter’s Curtis sleep better at night by comparison, Melancholia becomes the third major film in 2011 to invoke nothing less than the cosmos itself in its contemplation of the infinite, and of the individual beyond the infinite. This is another atheist’s nightmare: what if we leapt outwards, in a powers-of-ten shot of the Earth, only to realize quite decisively that there’s no god in his heaven to make Jessica Chastain levitate in a pretty spray of water droplets… or, more pertinently to Melancholia’s crisis, make the Earth not smack headlong into a fast-moving alien planet?

Melancholia is formally divided into two chapters, though it’s really broken into four significant parts: the prologue, in which the world ends; Chapter 1, “Justine,” in which clinically depressed Kirsten Dunst gets married; Chapter 2, “Claire,” in which Charlotte Gainsbourg, as Justine’s sister, comes to realize that the world is going to end; and a short epilogue, in which the world ends again. The piece that sticks out is Chapter 1. Aside from not troubling itself much with 2001: A Space Odyssey leftover shots of planets and stars and so forth, Justine’s wedding is an uncommonly ground-level observation of the behaviour of, and reactions to, a depressed person. On her way into the reception, Justine notices a star in the heavens where it should not be, but she is otherwise unaware of what later becomes (I presume) a planet-wide emergency, the approach of the planet Melancholia.

But that leaves the behaviour of, and reactions to, a depressed person. In Melancholia there is symbiosis between the two, which rings true. As Justine arrives (late!) at her wedding we begin to see what seem like perfectly normal archetypes of such an affair – the father, the boss, the mother, the husband – evolve beyond their comfortable social boundaries. Dad’s a seeming polygamist; Mom’s vocally and nearly violently against anything to do with marriage; the boss is running a cruel game of brinksmanship with a dimwitted pawn; and the husband is… well, apparently an idiot.

Over the course of the evening we watch them all transform into ley lines of force and influence, each exerting a torturous pressure on Justine – though each, in turn, enters into a feedback loop with Justine’s own behaviour. The loops charge with more and more toxic energy until each line ultimate explodes. So, as an audience, we’re not much taken aback when Justine eschews a tryst with her new hubby in the master bedroom in favour of fucking an errand boy in the dirt outside. It’s more that when the breaking point finally arrives, we can feel the relief that comes of hitting bottom.

I said I presumed that the approach of Melancholia would be a planet-wide emergency, but Von Trier's film (of course) does not bother with those Day After Tomorrow trivialities. As the alien world begins its dance of death with the Earth, we remain isolated on the grounds of Claire’s husband’s mansion. A wide shot of the empty lawns at night - with the moon lighting it from one direction, and Melancholia from the other, creating pale, criss-crossed shadows - is a tender visual grace note. I don’t think we ever even hear a radio broadcast. Claire is on the internet at one point, but before she can print out a conspiracy theory that has Melancholia hitting the Earth instead of passing it by, the power goes out, catching the printer in mid-job. Offscreen, the horses in the stables are beginning to freak out. Claire’s husband (played with gargantuan cock by Kiefer Sutherland) guides the family through the stellar event like Richard Kiley narrating a sightseeing tour through Jurassic Park - right up till, and beyond, the moment when everyone figures out that Melancholia will not harmlessly miss us, but rather hit us head-on.

But there was something of a larger warning, I think, in an earlier scene, where Claire follows Justine out into the grounds in the middle of the night, and is startled to find Justine lying naked on the banks of the river, watching Melancholia grow larger in the sky, caressing her breasts and looking, on the whole, more clear-eyed and content than we have seen her since her wedding night. Justine had been nearly comatose since the wedding, barely emerging from bed, barely eating, cared for by her sister in the throes of deep, deep depression. Now, with the light of Melancholia in her eyes, Justine looks alive – and when the end comes, she’ll look it again.

A profound foreboding overtakes Claire, however, and overtook me as well while watching the film, and not entirely for reasons having to do with the omnipresent possibility that all life on our planet might be dislodged by some stellar cataclysm or other. “Be happy,” Justine is beseeched, twice, in the course of the film, in that carefully careless way of people who have every reasonable ability to understand and sympathize with the medical path of depression, but are fucking fed up with it anyway. Maybe those people called the end of the world into being without meaning to, in order to create a few moments on earth where the external catastrophe finally justified the slow beating of Justine’s heart.

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