Melancholia: An Artsy Romance of Planetary Doom
But despite the jubilant mood, Justine seems more a bystander than participant in the party, slipping away to take a bath and to search for her equally distracted mother Gaby (Charlotte Rampling) and father Dexter (John Hurt), clearly hoping to confide in them. As the evening spirals into disaster and Justine falls into inescapable despair, she has sex with a young party guest and tells off her boss Jack (Stellan Skarsgard). Despite all of Claire’s ministrations and efforts to head off the looming cataclysm, Justine is deep in the throes of a profound, crushing, ruinous depression that has snuffed the light out of her eyes, and any sense of optimism about the future.
An astoundingly gorgeous film that imagines depression as—quite literally—the end of the world, Danish director Lars von Trier’s Melancholia draws from the director’s own famously herculean bouts with depression. Intensifying the gravity of such existential pain, von Trier casts the sunny blonde Dunst in the role, to better convey depression’s paralyzing, inescapable dread, as apt to destroy the beautiful and privileged as the luckless and abject.
With her marriage essentially ruined over the course of the reception and the groom departed, sisters Justine and Claire hole up at the resort. Both attentive and furious, Claire tries to pull Justine out of a despair that has left her confined to her bed, too sapped to eat or bathe.
But like any mental illness that can defy all efforts to aid or fix, the intractability of Justine’s depression is measured by the larger, cosmic force looming over the entire planet.
© 2011 Magnolia Pictures.
A planet, Melancholia, has appeared in the sky and threatens to obliterate earth. That planet, in a nutshell, is Dunst’s mood. Depression as an evisceration of all happiness, of all hope, is clearly on von Trier’s mind.
Representing two sides of the human response to mortality and to life itself, Justine is resigned to the planet’s destruction: in every regard, that encroaching planet is a metaphor for her own obliterating depression. But her sister, who also has a small son Leo (Cameron Spurr) to consider, rages against the possible end of the world, desperately clinging to some hope of salvation.
Steeped in a deep sense of despair, Melancholia is a relentless plunge into the contemplation of nothingness. Melancholia is the second film this year, following the indie Another Earth, to deal with a planet encroaching on the earth. Melancholia also feels linked to the apocalyptic, existential thriller Take Shelter and Terrence Malick’s fugue on life and the afterlife The Tree of Life, both of which dare to convey the gravitas of ordinary existence and imagine the true terror of death. Like Malick, von Trier is contemplating nothing less than the enormity of existence.
In many ways these films are linked by the time in which they were made. Just as a bounty of alien-invasion films in the Fifties expressed a pervasive fear of Communist onslaught, this rash of environmental thrillers crystallize fears about environmental damage, projecting a pervasive malaise about the earth’s future onto these threatening planets and obliterating tornadoes.
John Everett Millais, Ophelia, c. 1851, oil on canvas, 76.2 cm x 111.8 cm (30 x 44 inches). Tate Britain; courtesy Wikimedia Commons and the Google Art Project.
But Melancholia also achieves much of its sense of gloom and heartsickness by reaching back into the archives of art history to convey some of the depth and drama of the human condition rendered in the most intense and hyperbolic terms. As yet another expression of her raging melancholy, Justine steals away from her wedding in the film’s first half and wanders into the resort’s library. Open on the study’s shelves are multiple books featuring the graphic, chilly geometrics of formalist art. Justine replaces them, one by one, with books featuring lush oil paintings: John Everett Millais’ Ophelia, Pieter Bruegel’s Land of Cockaigne with its portrait of spiritual emptiness in a land of excess and Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath. Cool intellectualism is thus replaced by ecstatic scenes of terror and dread.
Von Trier’s references to painting’s emotional wallop begins with Melancholia’s rapturously beautiful opening credits set to soaring, thunderous Wagner. A series of apocalyptic, slow-motion vignettes recall the narrative-choked photographs of Jeff Wall or Gregory Crewdson. In these haunting opening images, Justine struggles to walk through a consuming landscape but is impeded by gray tendrils, like seaweed dragging her to the ocean’s bottom, that encircle her body and dress.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Land of Cockaigne, 1567, oil on wood, 52 × 78 cm (20.5 × 30.7 inches). Alte Pinakothek; courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
In another vignette eerily similar to one in the existential disaster film Take Shelter, birds falls from the sky like rain behind Justine’s head. These frozen horrors are von Trier’s attempts to create a Bruegel-like majesty: a still life of the darkness to come in painterly, operatic interludes. Sandwiched within those opening frames of apocalypse and disorder is Bruegel’s The Hunters in the Snow, with its scene of dejected hunters returning from a fruitless hunt beneath a forbidding gray sky.
Von Trier’s similarly gloomy landscapes are animated paintings, slowly unfolding, breathed into life by the filmmaker’s apparatus of the motion-picture camera. Like the haunting, slow-motion images in Antichrist, the special effects in Melancholia are so divinely lovely, they reveal the element of the sublime within melancholy: its mixture of pleasure and dread.
Von Trier has crafted a career out of films that use the ostensibly entertaining medium of film to induce states of extreme anxiety and dread. Like the Austrian director Michael Haneke, von Trier has been pilloried for his films’ sadism. Echoing his breakthrough 1996 film Breaking the Waves, in which the hope and promise of a wedding is also disrupted by a couple’s descent into misery, Melancholia imagines the very worst. As an expression of the times we live in, in the wake of oil spills and widespread corruption, sexual predation, and endless war, it’s hard to imagine any other response. As Justine intones from her well of suffering, “The earth is evil.”—Felicia Feaster
Copyright © 2011 BURNAWAY. All Rights Reserved.
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