Meloncholia
Directred by Lars von Trier
Distributed by Nordisk Film
Lars Von Trier, a Danish cinematic genius, delves into mythological and religious themes yet again with Melancholia, starring Kirsten Dunst, Kiefer Sutherland, and Von Trier it-girl Charlotte Gainsbourg.
Like its critical predecessor Antichrist, the film includes beautifully stark dream sequences but it’s certainly more palatable for general audiences, as it delves into the craze du jour: apocalypticism.
The film showcases two sisters dealing very differently with the threat of a distant planet about to collide with Earth. Dunst plays Justine, who is jaded by mental illness, while Gainsbourg plays her sister Claire, who is more sensitive to the impending doom.
Von Trier always expresses every nuance of emotion, extrapolating raw sexuality, and particularly in Melancholia, family madness, in a palpable juxtaposition against mother nature’s own absurdity.
Von Trier, who revels in shocking his audiences, doesn’t entirely omit frank scenes of sexuality. In an early scene, while still wearing her wedding dress, Justine ruins her wedding by sleeping with a man she just met. The sheer impulsiveness highlights the numbing effects of mental illness, and highlights her lack of regard towards consequences, even in the midst of an apocalypse.
The film’s introduction of dream sequences is another von Trier convention, but without close scrutiny, they could easily be disregarded. The sequences are imbued with brilliant, Romantic-era symbolism. The force of nature as a destructive entity, and Dunst’s tragic flaw contribute to this theme of the natural sublime.
Von Trier employs this while remaining faithful to his focus on tortured heroines, separating the film into two parts, each focusing on the sisters’ respective internal struggles.
The apathetic and despondent Justine is seen as a victim and perpetual child and treated as such. In spite of this, she protests those who inadvertently belittle her character, by grasping any means of control she can access.
Perhaps searching for a rational foil to simmer the conspiracy theorists, von Trier cast Sutherland, the former 24 star, as an astronomy-practicing scientist named John. John’s rational thinking in the midst of external forces added to the sheer horror of the planet’s demise.
His character’s initial denial and eventual certainty of the world’s demise support the frightening premise, further enhanced with von Trier’s characteristic handheld camera work, jump cuts and unbridled human emotion.
Rather than taking the relatively Baroque route as seen in 2009’s AntiChrist, Von Trier borrowed Richard Wagner’s compelling, yet bittersweet “Tristan und Isolde Prelude,” which held the film tightly in a tense grip. The 19th century classical composition emphasizes Justine’s apathy, and contentment with the foreign planet, aptly named Melancholia, which scientists foretell will decimate the Earth upon impact.
Whether the general public decries Melancholia as art house nonsense, or becomes enamoured by the horrific depiction of the modern end-of-the-world, von Trier delivers another masterpiece paying tribute to the fragile aspects of the human condition.
