For a filmmaker often labelled a showman or
ringmaster, Lars Von Trier has a peculiar approach to talking up his
work. Ahead of this morning´s Competition premiere of Melancholia, which
at times comes close to being a tragi-comic opera about the end of the
world, he declared: “I may have made a film I don´t like.” Why? Because,
he added, “This film is perilously close to the aesthetic of American
mainstream films.”
Really? Only in the
happily perverse head of the director of Breaking The Waves and the 2000
Palme d´Or-winning Dancer In the Dark, could Melancholia be seen as
safe or traditional. It takes a baffling, almost bone-headed premise,
the stuff of schlocky genre movies, and from it creates a mesmerizing,
visually gorgeous and often-moving alloy of family drama, philosophical
meditation and anti-golfing tract.
It begins, a la The Tree Of
Life, with a succession of striking, sometimes cosmological images -
extreme slow-motion of birds falling from the sky as Kirsten Dunst,
wearing a bridal dress, gazes impassively at the camera; a horse tumbles
to ground; a small planet drifts inexorably towards earth before
crashing into it. Very soon this visual pageantry gives way to the
handheld, intimate style that characterizes most of the film.
Dunst
is Justine, an advertising copywriter who´s about to get married (to a
sweet, but rather out-of-his depth chap played Alexander Skarsgard) at a
remote and lavish castle. The wedding has been organized by her sister
Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and brother-in-law (Kiefer Sutherland),
but quickly slides into a Festen-style nearest-and-dearest disaster:
Justine´s parents (John Hurt, obsessed with women called Betty, and a
deliciously citric Charlotte Rampling) don´t get on; her arrogant boss
(Stellan Skarsgard) is trying to conduct business; she herself, when
she´s not crying or holding up proceedings by taking leisurely baths,
has sex with a stranger on the estate´s golf course.
Justine
suffers from depression, almost a pathetic fallacy seeing that a planet
called Melancholia is heading for a collision course with Earth within
days. The film, split into two sections, contrasts the two sisters:
Justine, troubled, but with a darker vision of existence that seems not
only to chime with Von Trier´s, but to better prepare her for the
onrushing calamity than Claire´s more rational, almost bourgeois
perspective.