Featuring a stellar cast led by Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg, Melancholia will either hypnotize you or infuriate you - but guaranteed, it will provoke you.
One of the highlights from this year’s film festival, the wonderfully depressing Melancholia returns to NZ screens with unblemished potency, providing much needed counter programming to the jolly festivities of Christmas. Directed by Lars von Trier, Melancholia is a sister feature to his now infamous Antichrist, both films touching on the debilitating effects of depression and how it ripples across relationships. But of course, it’s not as simple as that – Melancholia portrays this in its most stylistic and exaggerated fashion, literally creating a fictional rogue planet on a collision course to Earth. Featuring a stellar cast led by Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg, Melancholia will either hypnotize you or infuriate you – but guaranteed, it will provoke you.
Told in two acts, the film opens with a ten-minute prologue featuring extreme slow motion – a grand music video to the tune of Wagner’s prologue to Tristan and Isolde. It unravels beautifully, as it uncannily previews notable moments in the film in mesmerizing fashion. Unashamedly referencing high culture, the prologue then gives way to its first chapter named Justine. Mainly focusing on the newlyweds Justine (Dunst) and Michael’s (Alexander Skarsgard, TV’s True Blood) wedding reception, it reveals the psychological profile of the sisters through their families: a psychologically disaffected mother (Charlotte Rampling) suggests Justine’s own depression is genetic, whereas their distant father (John Hurt) indicates Claire’s (Gainsbourg) marriage to control freak John (Kiefer Sutherland) as an unresolved Electra complex. I’m speculating of course, but the film allows that to happen, providing multitudes of narrative threads in a wedding that stands dangerously close to edge of disaster.
Chapter two is a much more intimate affair, focusing on how the sisters react on the verge of calamity, as the telluric planet Melancholia advances towards Earth. John’s false optimism is obviously toxic, as Justine’s own depression becomes her asset, her disaffection a shield against the sentimentality of humanity’s demise, while her sister Claire depicts such sentimentality in hysterical fashion. Dialogue from the first chapter is brilliantly re-contextualized, as the threat of the planet is so ominous and fantastically surreal. The final scene is so glorious it necessitates a big screen viewing
The acting is absolutely stunning. Kirsten Dunst deserves her Best Actress award from this year’s Cannes film festival as she reveals her all – drawing from her own bouts with depression. It’s her best performance to date. The rest of the cast is equally faultless, Gainsbourg effective as the film’s emotional anchor and Sutherland as a very convincing douchebag. Marking Melancholia a disaster film is dangerously reductionist, but nevertheless apt, as it contradicts every disaster film staple: no big crowds in awe of calamity and most notably, no such thing as mankind rising from the ashes. This cold depiction of humanity as a meaningless affair could possibly be the closest thing to an autobiography we can get from Von Trier, with his own experiences of deep depression clearly visible.
Melancholia is faultless and possibly the best film of the year. It’s a film of two halves: on the one hand, displaying the pitfalls of depression as it renders obsolete human connection, but on the other, argues a case for depression as the most effective way in dealing with emotionally devastating events. And with an ending like this, a happy ending is indeed subjective.
Reynald Castaneda