Melancholia
Written and directed by Lars von Trier, Les Films du Losange
One of the best things about living in Paris is that films hang around in the cinema a lot longer than they do in other major cities. In the US, you have about 10 days to catch something on a big screen; in Paris, you have about two months.
All the better to catch the final week’s run of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, released in Paris in August and winding up its run at most cinemas this coming Tuesday.
We all know by now that some films will hold up just as well on our giant television screens or even our oversized computer monitors, and so we can wait for the digital stream or DVD or however you like to get your movies. But some films are so much better relished through the size and scope of a theater screen, through the surround-sound speaker system and through the collective experience only to be had in the company of an audience. Melancholia is one of these films.
Melancholia is the tale of two sisters, Justine (Kirstine Dunst) and Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), and how they each deal with the news of impending doom. Most disaster films assume the disaster is inevitable, and the story is usually one of how we go about preparing to die. The difference with Melancholia—and the shot in the arm the disaster genre needs—is that we don’t know that the disaster is inevitable. It remains a question all the way through the film, ratcheting up the tension and giving us perhaps a more quiet but far more intense ride. Lars von Trier plays with the secret of all good horror directors: the fear of the unknown.
The first half of the film is dedicated to Justine, who has just married Michael (Alexander Skarsgård), a doting, docile, and dogged young husband who seems simply happy to be by Justine’s side. The two arrive late for their reception, hosted at the four-star hotel and golf course owned by Claire’s husband, John (Kiefer Sutherland), who doesn’t like to anyone forget how wealthy he is or how much money he’s shelled out for his sister-in-law’s reception. The only one who doesn’t seem happy to be there is Justine herself, who finds herself drifting away time and again, bothered by an anxiety she can’t name that pulls her away from all the sensible things a young bride should do on her wedding night, and lures her into increasingly disturbing behavior that finally destroys everything around her.
The second half of the film is Claire’s, and picks up several months after the disastrous wedding reception. Justine, now suffering acute Melancholia, comes to stay with Claire and her family, to the irritation of Claire’s husband. He would raise more of a protest against Claire’s troubled sister, except that he’s preoccupied with a planet that will be passing by the Earth in a matter of days – an even so rare, it has the amateur cosmologist in him giddy with glee. But Claire has a foreboding, and anxiety that – unlike her sister – she can name: she fears the planet will collide with the Earth and destroy them all. It is such a crippling fear, she goes so far as to stash a full bottle of sleeping pills to ingest should disaster become inevitable. And while Justine slowly recovers from her Melancholia and rejoins the family, Claire’s anxiety grows and grows, impotent—as all anxiety is—to control her own state or the path of the planet, her impotence feeding further her own fear.
The fact that von Trier cast two such disparate actresses as sisters and made it utterly believable is remarkable in itself. But credit is also due Gainsbourg and Dunst: Gainsbourg, dark and mysterious, beautiful and not beautiful, is as fragile as a filament of steel. Dunst, on the other hand, who is plainly and luminously beautiful, her sharp, flat American accent almost taunts Gainsbourg’s refined British tones. And yet the two play off each other wonderfully, suggesting a lifetime’s worth of love and hate and the entire scope in between that make up a sisterly relationship. Their performances are both noteworthy, although different in nature.
Likewise are the cast of von Trier regulars: Stellan Skarsgård as Justine’s boss, Udo Kier as the wedding planner (genius casting, that), a jovial John Hurt and bitter Charlotte Rampling as Justine and Claire’s ineffectual parents. And of course Kiefer Sutherland, who appears to be delighting in playing the pompous ass in this film, and it’s difficult not to be delighted with him.
But as always, it’s von Trier’s picture – his vision, his story, his fears and phobias writ large for all to see, always embodied in his female protagonists who provide a depth and examination of feeling rarely seen in film. This is von Trier at his very best, back to his Breaking the Waves days. Melancholia is just as moving, just as harrowing, but in a more refined, mature and precise way.
Lars von Trier likes trilogies, and it seems that Melancholia may be the second in a trilogy-in-the-making that started with his controversial Antichrist. Both films utilize a similar opening credit sequence and the same slowed shutter speed and gorgeously lit shots as a sort of prologue (a literal prologue in the case of Antichrist), and both films deal with anxiety, panic and grief. But where Antichrist is pornographic is its depictions of sex, love, death, and violence, Melancholia is restrained and almost delicate. And where Antichrist’s prologue provides us the history of recent events in the characters’ lives when we pick up the story, Melancholia’s prologue simply gives us sharp, almost surreal images that ominously border nightmare logic. Evoking some of the video work by artist Bill Viola, the jarring intensity of the opening shots effectively unsettle the viewer.
And that sumptuous cinematography alone is worth the ticket price, by the way: every shot is meticulous and breathtaking. But the real reason you should rush right out and see this before it leaves cinemas is for the ending. I won’t ruin it for you, but believe me: you don’t want to miss it. And you don’t want to see it on a small screen.
May 2011, Vingt Paris Magazine