Melancholia

This is a lethargic, pretty and frustratingly empty study in ways of living and dying from Danish director Lars Von Trier. He follows ‘Antichrist’ with a more calm and restrained work but also one which feels curiously disengaged from the world and only impressive and powerful on a technical level rather than an intellectual or emotional one.

For all the time spent with the film’s two main characters – two sisters, Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), whose names and contrasting reactions to the approaching end of the world define the film’s two chapters – it feels that Von Trier is mostly in it for just a handful of striking images set to music from Wagner’s ‘Tristan and Isolde’. Much of the rest of the film feels like wading through glue in beautiful surroundings.

We see the best of those images in an opening, slow-motion montage set to Wagner and reminiscent of the hyper-stylised prologue to ‘Antichrist’: a moon and another planet casting two shadows across a formal garden at night; a horse rearing in a field; Dunst’s character floating in water and weeds in a nod to Millais’s ‘Ophelia’; and a rogue, larger planet moving closer to Earth and swallowing it up entirely.

This last image is the science bit, handily reconfirmed later on when a character looks up the planet Melancholia on Google, but only hazily part of the narrative until the film’s final stages. Apathy or engagement, looking inwards or outwards, are some of the film’s main themes, and Von Trier chooses a hermetic wealthy family, played by actors from both sides of the Atlantic, at a country house in a undefined location to explore these ideas.

The first chapter, ‘Justine’, plays out at that character’s high-society wedding in the grand home of her sister, Claire, and brother-in-law John (Kiefer Sutherland). These scenes are more workaday, ground-level, recognisable Von Trier: they’re shot in a handheld, documentary-style, with jump cuts and loosely-played dialogue. The wedding offers quiet laughs as Justine’s fractured family, especially her mother (Charlotte Rampling) and father (John Hurt) snap at each other and indulge their own eccentricities.

The wedding has a laconic feel, matched by Dunst’s increasingly spaced-out, whacked manner as she reacts to the oncoming planet by becomingly more and more passive and removed and eventually being barely able to walk. Most of the dialogue feels extraordinarily bogus. Maybe it’s meant to, but it’s distracting. This chapter offers one very striking image, similar to some of the more ghostly forest moments in ‘Antichrist’ as Dunst lays naked in the garden at night, soaking up the glow of the enemy planet – Melancholia-bathing, I suppose. It looks like a photo by Gregory Crewdson, both real and artificial, heavily lit and formal but not superficial. Much of the film looks like this and it’s a glorious aesthetic.

It’s the content that’s lacking. In the second chapter, ‘Claire’, the wedding is over, having ended badly and is barely referred to, and we’re left at the house over the next few days with only Justine, Claire, John, their child and their staff. This is where the film feels without a proper script, and Dunst and Gainsbourg are the victims of this, flapping through scenes of false emotion as Claire is terrified, weepy and scared in contrast to Justine’s resigned attitude to the apocalypse, which, when it comes, offers a great final image but one that feels isolated from the tedium of much of what has come before.

‘Melancholia’ isn’t a provocative or confrontational film but it’s too often a dull one. Von Trier takes his title at face value and infuses his film with a laidback, removed air, too free of real ideas, in contrast to the careful working of his imagery. That’s what’s really depressing.