Melancholia, Lars von Trier’s new apocalyptic parlor drama, is a depressive’s feast, a vision of the end of the world as mercy killing. Really, it’s two movies in one, a baroque, science-fiction disaster movie sharing space with a dour comedy of manners, chronicling one of the worst weddings of all time. The title also has a double meaning: it refers both to the condition suffered by the film’s protagonist, Justine (Kirsten Dunst), and to a planet on a collision course with Earth.
The set-up is simple: Justine is getting married to Michael (Alexander Skarsgård). The wedding is being hosted by Justine’s judgmental sister, Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and impossibly smug, excessively wealthy husband, John (Kiefer Sutherland) at their sea-side golf course chateau.
Things go wrong from the outset. Justine and Michael arrive late. The hosts are impatient and the wedding planner (Udo Kier) won’t even look at the bride out of rage. Justine’s parents are impossible: her father (John Hurt) is an irresponsible fool, desperate to be liked, and her mother (a ferocious Charlotte Rampling) is cynical to the point of mania. Justine absents herself from the proceedings as much as she can, lolling in the bathtub, hanging out with the horses in the stable, sleeping in her room, but despite her best efforts the night gets worse and worse. Her sister is furious with her for being depressed, her brother-in-law for being ungrateful, and her boss (an oleaginous Stellan Skarsgård) is on hand to needle her about a tag line for an advertising campaign. With the addition of excess drinking and extramarital sex, the reception blossoms into a true social disaster, the kind of night that’s mortifying to even remember.
When Justine returns to her sister’s house after the wedding, she’s in the grip of full-blown clinical depression. She’s nearly catatonic, unable to eat or bathe unassisted. Claire treats her with a mixture of tenderness and frustration that feels wholly genuine. For a moment, von Trier lets his defenses drop, and shows depression for what it is, an illness, and not a heightened form of self-consciousness or sardonic social awareness. But as Melancholia the planet gets larger and larger in the sky, Justine starts to recover. Oddly, the end of the world works like a kind of homeopathic cure – a pinch of poison to cure the disease. Suddenly, Justine is playing with her nephew and moon-bathing in the nude. She even makes a little teepee to welcome the falling stars.
But by then, the real disaster has already happened. Melancholia opens with the end of the world, seen as a kind of dream or a prophecy. This wordless prologue is a brilliantly perverse set piece, sort of how you’d imagine the Book of Revelation to turn out if it were filmed by Douglas Sirk and Martha Stewart. It begins with a close-up of Justine, weeping exultantly while being pelted with dead birds. Elsewhere, a horse falls to the ground in slow motion, while figures in formal wedding attire march slowly across the chateau’s manicured lawn. Soon blue tendrils of electricity are shooting out of Justine’s hands to the sound of the Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, while in space the Earth falls into the embrace of another planet, the giant, blue Melancholia.
The planet itself is one of the best things in the movie. In the first half, it appears as a distant star. Gradually, it gets closer and closer, growing into a giant blue orb whose skies are dotted with little white clouds. It hangs in the night sky like a malevolent moon, getting larger and larger until it fills up the entire horizon, leaving no doubt about the inevitability of the final impact.
When the apocalypse finally arrives, it’s as sumptuous and strange as the prologue, complete with murky forests, swirling mists and shuddering livestock. The sequence has a weird bombast, which is at once comic and chilling. Apparently, the germ of the idea for Melancholia came to von Trier from his therapist, who mentioned that pessimists have an easier time of dealing with catastrophe because they’re less surprised by the idea that the universe might be trying to kill them. The movie’s ending elevates this dubious insight to the level of allegory.
The whole thing feels like an answer track to Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life, pitting death against birth, creation against destruction, chaos against evolution. Both movies are about people who, in their way, are genuinely at the center of the universe. The balance of the solar system hinges on Kirsten Dunst’s mood, just as all of time leads up to Sean Penn’s elevator ride in Malick’s Tree.
For all the resemblance between them, Malick and von Trier arrive at their cosmic dramas from opposing philosophical planes. Malick’s film drinks from the well of American transcendentalism, Emerson’s Oversoul and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Von Trier’s great debt is to Schopenhauer and German Romantic painting. (You can follow this influence down to lighting design of the two films: Tree of Life is all autumnal sunshine and late-evening radiance, while von Trier films everything in a moody, moonlit swoon, as if the sun had already gone out).
There is a deeper difference between the two as well. While Malick seems to come by his transcendentalism honestly, for von Trier, Romanticism seems like a pose (he admitted as much in the course of the interview in the course of which he compared himself to Hitler, leading to his expulsion from Cannes). And this makes all the elaborate visual trappings of Melancholia – the enveloping mists and windswept coasts ripped from Caspar David Friedrich paintings, the horses galloping through the fog and the castle borrowed from Cries and Whispers – feel like a put-on, as if to say ‘You think this is beautiful? The Nazis thought so too.’ Even his pessimism feels forced, like the misogyny in Antichrist (the credits for Antichrist mentioned a misogyny consultant; I don’t know if Melancholia had an eschatology advisor.)
Disingenuous or not though, the apocalypse that bookends Melancholia does dazzle. Schopenhauer was right: like flaming airships and late-season collapses, cosmic catastrophes really do bring man in contact with the fullest feeling of the sublime. But Von Trier isn’t quite the skeptic he seems to think he is. Like most of his movies, Melancholia tries to have it both ways: believing in redemption through suffering while denying its possibility to all but a select few. There’s a dose of wish-fulfillment too: the yearning of a Wagnerian adolescent who wishes that the universe conformed to his emotions so that the world could know his pain. When Justine announces that “life is only on Earth, and not for long,” it’s supposed to be a prophecy. Out of her lips, it sounds more like a prayer.
