This seems to me von Trier’s most mature film since
The Idiots. Whereas
Antichrist was an immediate reaction to / against his struggle with serious depression,
Melancholia is a more considered and ambitious film about the same thing. In fact, I wonder if its genesis wasn’t Lars’ bloody-minded response to some inane well-wisher’s reassurance that whatever he was going through, “it’s not the end of the world.”
The film’s prologue is a self-conscious showstopper, in the mould of the opening of
Antichrist. Even without the rest of the film, it would be one of the films of the year, and I think its overwhelming beauty and terror is what got a lot of the audience through the comparatively low-key hand-held talkfest of the following two hours – since we know we’re going back there.
After that, we get, in the first part, a richly cast, very entertaining wedding melodrama and then a much more subdued, Bergman-style chamber piece in the second (and throughout, we’re treated to the originating images and events for the remarkable tableaux in the prologue, and checking them off becomes an interesting kind of countdown to doom). The effect of the human story that occupies the central two hours is to transform the events of the prologue into perhaps the most outlandish instance of pathetic fallacy ever conceived.
The narrative structure is interesting, since there’s no surprise about how everything ends up, so it becomes more a case of observing how the main characters adapt themselves to the inevitable.
In this respect it becomes a kind of case study of optimism, realism and pessimism, with pessimist / depressive Justine ultimately finding herself the most functional and level-headed person in the room. After all, it’s only the end of the world. She’s seen worse.
The end, when it comes – and even though you know there’s absolutely no way it can live up to the beginning – does not disappoint, and it’s an object lesson that films should be seen on the biggest screen available, with the best sound system.
So what was going on at Cannes? If I were to indulge in a spot of psychoanalysis, I’d speculate that this is quite possibly von Trier’s most personal film yet (it’s very easy to see Justine as a self-portrait), and he dealt with that self-exposure by, first, downplaying the seriousness and importance of the film and second, when that didn’t work, by shooting himself in the foot at the press conference, thereby creating a convenient alibi for not winning the
Palme d’Or. Frankly, without the coincidental appearance of Malick’s Comet, it seems to me that this would have been a shoo-in.
Dunst fully deserved her win, as she manages to tie together a role that, as written, is deliberately all over the place, and she gets to play all kinds of moods and the sudden transitions between them. I don’t suffer from depression myself, but a woman I know who does found Dunst’s performance extremely persuasive and affecting, and indeed found the entire film deeply personal and very close to the bone.
Despite the overall quality of the film, some of van Trier’s recurrent problems are still present. The vast majority of the characters never rise above the status of cartoons. I think this is one of the reasons why I tend to find his comedies more accomplished than his dramas, and the first part of
Melancholia is very funny indeed, while also managing, through the more nuanced performances of Dunst, Gainsbourg and Skarsgard the younger (and a wonderful Charlotte Rampling, who secretes enough acid in what’s really only a glorified cameo to scar the entire cast), to carry plenty of authentic dramatic heft.
In the second half, it gets more serious and the cast thins out, so the problems with characterisation are a bit harder to ignore, primarily when we’re expected to swallow Kiefer Sutherland’s transition from comic figure to tragic figure between scenes, with hardly any time spent as an actual character.
But by this point the momentum of the drama is strong enough to withstand that kind of glitch. Similarly, at the start there’s some very clunky exposition when Dunst just happens to notice Antares (so she can just happen to notice its absence a little later on), but because we’re impatient for the cosmic disaster plot to get moving, we can get past the creakiness of the plot mechanics. The shaggy-dog ‘tagline’ subplot is a bit more of a liability, since it’s nowhere near as funny as it should be, and just ends up as an excuse for an (over-)running visual gag.
These are pretty minor flaws in an otherwise impressively controlled film.