Melancholia
About a third of the way into Lars von Trier’s end of the world drama Melancholia you start hoping
the world will end and kill all the protagonists. About an hour in, you start praying the world will
end and kill all the protagonists. Then, somewhere around the 90 minutes mark,
when you realise there's another 46 minutes left for you to endure, you start
praying the world will actually end and kill you...
Borrowing its basic premise from Philip Wylie & Edwin Balmer’s
classic ‘30s pulp novel When Worlds Collide (already filmed in 1951 and
in the process of being remade by The Mummy director Stephen Sommers), Melancholia sucks all the fun
out of the end of the world.
Admittedly, it’s Lars von Trier so it’s doubtful anyone in the audience
is expecting Roland Emmerich or Michael Bay levels of planet trashing but
still…would it have killed you Lars to drop a comedy asteroid on say, Udo Kier,
whose sole function as wedding planner in the movie is to offer the closest
thing to boggle-eyed light relief?
Melancholia opens with a lengthy, bravura slow-motion collage of
apocalyptic imagery; dead birds rain down around Kirsten Dunst, a horse
collapses, Charlotte Gainsbourg struggles across a quicksand golf course with a
child in her arms in the middle of a hail storm, static electricity arcs
skywards from Dunst’s fingers, Dunst in a wedding dress lies floating in a pond
in a self-concious nod to Millais’ Ophelia, an extra-solar planet looms
menacingly towards the Earth before finally striking it, swallowing it
whole. And it’s all cut to
Wagner’s prelude to Tristan und Isolde, considered by Proust and
Nietzsche (and probably von Trier) to be one of the greatest pieces of music
ever written. It’s a fantastic
opening, in around 10 minutes it distils Melancholia’s themes and plot
strands into a bite-sized chunk that makes the two and a bit hours that follow
not only redundant but a tedious, superfluous waste of your time. Even if you do get to see Kirsten
nekkid.
The rest of the film is divided into two distinct parts; each named
after the pair of sisters played by Dunst and Gainsbourg. The first half, Justine, is set during
the wedding reception from Hell, like Festen without the child abuse and
suicide (What is it with the Danes that they can’t just enjoy a party?). Justine (Dunst) has just married
Michael (Alexander Skarsgard) and, at the reception held in the up-market
holiday resort owned by sister Claire (Gainsbourg) and her husband John (Kiefer
Sutherland), after a series of delays, minor mishaps and bad behaviour by some
of the guests (most notably her parents John Hurt and Charlotte Rampling), the
marriage implodes, Justine’s depression overtaking her, driving her to destroy
her relationship with Michael and insult her boss. All the while a new star glitters in the sky, watching over
events. The second half, Claire, sees Claire,
John, son Leo (Cameron Spurr) and the almost catatonically depressed Justine
(well, Alexander Skarsgard has just slipped though her fingers. You’d be depressed too…) gather at the
deserted resort to watch the flyby of newly discovered extra-solar rogue planet
Melancholia which is due to narrowly miss the Earth. As Melancholia gets closer and it becomes increasingly
obvious that it’s going to hit the Earth, the sisters almost swap
personalities, the depressed Justine taking the end of the world in her stride
while Claire dissolves into hysteria and entertains thoughts of suicide.
Overlong, ponderous and pretentious, Melancholia offers few
insights on the human condition other than von Trier’s belief that depressed
people are good in a crisis as they already expect the worst. While it’s gorgeously shot, definitely
the most visually stunning film von Trier has made (if Peter Greenaway made a
disaster movie, this is what it would like), with it’s melding of the personal
with the cosmic and its desperate groping for profundity, Melancholia feels like a
gloomy companion piece to this year’s self-indulgent Palmes d’Or-winner The
Tree Of Life.
Never the subtlest of filmmakers, watching Melancholia feels like you’re
being Danza slapped about the head by an engorged von Trier for two and a bit
hours. “Look bitches,” he’s
saying, “The film’s called Melancholia. (Slap) Kirsten
Dunst is depressed. (Slap) She has melancholia. (Slap) She’s so depressed the world is ending. (Slap) That’s what it’s like being depressed. You want the world to end. Do you get it? (Slap) Do you? (Slap) Who’s your daddy?
(Slap) Who’s your daddy,
bitch? (Slap) Yeah baby, Lars is your daddy…”
While von Trier’s diverse, eclectic cast are uniformly excellent, with
Dunst and Gainsbourg perfect as the sisters, Dunst giving her finest
performance in years and Gainsbourg almost equaling her performance in Antichrist, and there are
individual moments of breathtaking beauty; that fantastic opening, Dunst
wandering the hotel grounds at night in her wedding dress like a demented Miss
Havisham, Gainsbourg spying on Dunst as she bathes naked in the rays of
Melancholia, the stunning climax, ultimately, Melancholia is a soporific
disappointment.
David Watson
Director
Lars von Trier
Cast
Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg,
Kiefer Sutherland, Alexander Skarsgard, Stellan Skarsgard, Cameron Spurr, John
Hurt, Charlotte Rampling, Udo Kier
Written by
Lars von Trier
Country
Denmark/Sweden/France/Germany
Running time
136 minutes
Year
2011
Certificate
15
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