Melancholia
Lars von Trier (2011)
Lars von Trier must now be the best-known Scandinavian film-maker since Ingmar Bergman. Late in life, Bergman admitted to a youthful enthusiasm for Adolf Hitler and von Trier got in hot water by acknowledging in a Cannes press conference, when Melancholia was shown at this year’s festival, a degree of sympathy for the Nazi leader. The grim existentialism of Melancholia might suggest further common ground between the two film-makers; in fact, the best thing about von Trier’s latest is that it reminds you what a master Bergman was. In films like Through a Glass Darkly and Persona, he sets up situations where the characters are isolated in ways that draw you into their world and keep you within its severe limits; their obsessive self-preoccupation is compelling and convincing; the settings are appropriate for thinking and feeling in extremis, for reflecting on and wrestling with matters of life and death. Of course, Bergman uses other, very different contexts just as successfully to dramatise his existential themes – especially the medieval universe of great films like The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring. In Winter Light, it’s people in the real world who intensify the pastor’s self-absorption and callousness; a mixture of present realities, memories and fantasies enriches the exploration of Professor Borg’s psyche in Wild Strawberries. Creating worlds in which we believe – or in which we’re able to suspend disbelief – is what in Melancholia Lars von Trier signally fails to do.
The film is divided into two parts, ‘Justine’ and ‘Claire’, named for the two sisters who are the film’s principal characters. The first part tells of Justine’s wedding night – a lavish and highly populous occasion taking place at the vast home of Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her wealthy husband John (Kiefer Sutherland). Justine herself (Kirsten Dunst) has a highly successful career in advertising; she’s wonderful looking and has just married Michael (Alexander Skarsgård), a handsome, charming young man who evidently adores her. How could she be other than blissfully happy? Kirsten Dunst is well equipped to play a dazzling bride but von Trier gives her very little opportunity to use her characteristic radiance: Justine has suffered from depression and von Trier can’t wait to show her shadow side. The presence of hundreds of wedding guests is a severe impediment throughout the first half of Melancholia: you never accept this wedding because Justine’s psychological brittleness and social unpredictability are so immediately dominant. It’s hard to credit she agreed to a huge public occasion like this one, and impossible to believe that, if she did, anyone believed she’d survive it – not Michael or Claire or John, not her bitterly perceptive mother Gaby (Charlotte Rampling) or even Gaby’s indulgent ex-husband (John Hurt). The evening goes from bad to worse and the marriage is over before the night is. When Michael departs, Justine asks, ‘What did you expect?’ and it’s a reasonable question.
In the ‘Claire’ part, the isolation of the family – Claire, John, their young son Leo (the appealing Cameron Skurr) and Justine – is contrived and as unconvincing as the wedding throng. They’re still in the same place but the rest of the world, the nearest part of which is ‘the village’, mentioned but never seen, might be a million miles away. The family has a computer, which Claire, who has seemed sane and reasonably self-possessed in the first half, uses to Google information about a rogue planet that has emerged from behind the Sun and is about to pass by – or, Claire fears, collide with – Earth. Otherwise, there’s no contact with the outside world. We’re given no idea, except through the main characters, of what the media are saying about the planet, which is called Melancholia. We know only that ‘scientists’ are assuring everyone that everything will be all right.
The film audience knows from the outset of Melancholia that everything will be all wrong, thanks to an overture of key images from what’s to follow, culminating in a planetary collision. (These images also include a shot of the eighteen-hole golf course of which John is so proud, with a flag fluttering over … the nineteenth hole!) This intro is scored by Richard Wagner – on whom von Trier relies heavily throughout for emotional effect (in the light of his remarks at Cannes, the use of Wagner has an unfortunate resonance). It turns out not that the scientists were wrong about Melancholia but that they were concealing the truth (which makes it all the more improbable they’d have given the encroaching planet such a discouraging name). The idea of scientists being essentially and irredeemably sinister/too clever by half is an antique cliché – so too is the idea that someone mentally disturbed can ‘see’ and ‘know’ things others don’t, as Justine turns out to be able to do. As she and her new husband arrive belatedly for their wedding party, Justine spots a red star in the night sky and asks what it is. John, who seems at this stage to have a moderately informed amateur interest in astronomy (later on, he knows what the scientists know and commits suicide before the planet arrives to end his life), explains that it’s Antares, which, in the second half of the film, Melancholia has emerged to obscure. Justine registers a flicker of apprehension. It’s she who’s the clairvoyant; sister Claire, in spite of her name and increasing anxiety about Melancholia, is in the dark virtually throughout. The implication seems to be that either you understand the human condition and are like Justine or you’re benighted about how terrible things are: von Trier doesn’t admit the possibility of understanding lacrimae rerum but making the best of a bad job.
He’s nothing if not thorough in his heavy-handed determinism. Each guest at the nuptial celebrations is asked by the autocratic wedding planner (Udo Kier) to guess the number of beans in a jar – there’s a prize for the winner. At the end of a disastrous evening, the wedding planner returns to the subject of the beans with the understandably harassed Claire. He tells her how many there were and she replies, losing patience, ‘How incredible … how incredibly trivial’. When the planner insists, ‘But that is the result – and the guests want to know the result’, you think, ‘No, they don’t – most of them wouldn’t give the bloody beans a second thought once they’d got into the party’. The planner is proved right, though, because the beans matter to von Trier. When the groom arrives at the reception, he makes a guess but doesn’t presume to make it on behalf of his wife. He doesn’t need to: in the fullness of time, Justine explains to Claire that she knew exactly how many beans there were. It’s another example of her deeply penetrating because deeply depressed mind.
Lars von Trier wants to show the hopeless Justine as serene in the face of imminent apocalypse. According to Wikipedia, the idea for the film originated in:
‘… a therapy session [von Trier] attended during treatments for his depression. A therapist had told Trier [sic] that depressive people tend to act more calmly than others under heavy pressure, because they already expect bad things to happen.’
What an insight! Maybe for his next film von Trier will show us a person preparing for suicide in a calmly organised way, as if this too was unheard of. In Melancholia he lays on the depressive elements so thick that he sacrifices any dramatic possibilities in the story. We don’t really get a sense of any shift in the balance between the sisters because, for much of the second half, when Claire starts falling to pieces, Justine stays as unhappily messed up as she was in the first half. She sees death in everything: Claire makes her sister meatloaf and Justine cheers up momentarily: we assume this is comfort food because it’s something remembered from secure childhood days. But one mouthful and Justine is complaining it tastes of ashes. If Claire never gave any suggestion of fear of the planet until late in the day, it might have more impact as a symbol of the death coming for us all no matter how much we ignore it but she’s scared for too long, as if in a crackpot sibling rivalry. Gloom hangs over the family home like a pall so there isn’t any kind of happy life for the impending disaster, or terror of it, to destroy. I wasn’t sure at the end whether the little boy Leo was meant to be frightened or not – by this stage, he just seems long-suffering. Lars von Trier’s self-indulgence means that he has to have the big finish (as well as the big opening, of course) although it struck me that Melancholia might have been more powerful and frightening if the planet hadn’t hit but there’d been an individual death in the family while life on Earth survived. You know what you’re in for from the title: ‘Behind the Sun’ would have been at least somewhat allusive but von Trier wants portentous metaphysics at every turn.
Except for the abominable Udo Kier, Melancholia is well enough acted and the film, photographed by Manuel Alberto Claro, is often very beautiful – the lantern balloons floating into the night sky at the wedding party, the deadly but pacific blue planet itself (as someone says, it ‘looks friendly’). But the images are sometimes overdone: in a library, Justine looks at a succession of art history books and leaves them open at paintings connoting different kinds of death. They include ‘Hunters in the Snow’: after seeing that, we don’t need falling leaves superimposed on the screen to make the point. The skittering, often hand-held camera movements and disorienting editing rhythms create suspense – but the script creates none. Like The Tree of Life, this film is impoverished by the writer-director’s conviction that the creation of wondrous moving pictures is sufficient to animate his big themes. Von Trier seems not to realise that, for example, he skewers the world of advertising in which Justine (improbably) thrives in a pathetically obvious way, through the character of her boss (Stellan Skarsgård) and the dim young man (Brady Corbet) he gets to keep an eye on Justine through her wedding night. The young man gets to have sex with her briefly, which is more than can be said for the hapless, well-mannered bridegroom. The word groom reminds me I’ve not mentioned the horses in Melancholia but I can’t be bothered to go there.
2 October 2011