MELANCHOLIA (von Trier, 2011) - It has to be said: von Trier has balls - or, you know, guts, or whatever your favorite metaphor is. He opens his movie with a sequence that others would have used as a bombastic climax: not just gorgeous tableaux scored by Wagner, but literally the end of the world. At the end of it, I actually had to catch my breath - it was overwhelming and affecting and almost too much but not quite.
The problem after such an opening, of course, is that you have to live up to it, and while I greatly enjoyed the rest of the movie, I don’t think it quite does. Take the tableau above: it’s eerily beautiful but also disturbing, and it’s an incredibly evocative depiction of depression. The problem is that later in the movie, Kirsten Dunst’s Justine describes her depression as being tangled in grey wool, which a) is redundant and b) doesn’t do justice to just how twisted the image is. By verbalizing it, it makes the original image less special.
Still, there are great aspects. I loved Kiefer Sutherland’s character, and I thought the interaction between Dunst and her fiancé (Alexander Skarsgard) was very well done: it illustrates the dynamic between a depressed person and their partner very well, with the partner first feeling like a failure (because he/she cannot make the other happy) and then feeling more and more resentful for that, finally blaming them for not being magically made happy by you. The film also undercuts its own self-seriousness (it’s about depression AND the end of the world, after all) with many humorous touches, from the limo misadventures in the beginning to the entire presence of Udo Kier.
Oddly enough, I kind of get that von Trier’s described the ending as his happiest yet. I used to have this idea for a novel (which, being a teenager at the time, I found highly original) depicting what would happen if the impending end of the world was announced. People would panic, of course, and chaos would erupt, but it also seemed sort of liberating: money wouldn’t be worth anything any more (because when would you spend it?), possessions as a whole would be rendered completely trivial, and all you’d have to focus on is how to make the last 5/7/20 days - I couldn’t quite settled on a deadline* - count**.
Von Trier doesn’t show the world re-acting - his characters are white, privileged, and isolated on their estate, the world intruding only a little through the internet. Alternately, you could describe them as archetypes in a fairy tale. But for at least one of his characters, the impending doom seems to lift all burdens. After all, if you’re going to die no matter what, there’s no need to agonize over choices - except perhaps whether to have wine*** or which music to listen to as the world ends.
*About which word many puns would be made, obviously.
** I seem to recall a loss of virginity was involved - hey, I was a teenager, and still held on to some strange ideas, like that first times could be magical.
*** I would definitely do that - no need to worry about a hangover either, right?
