Another Girl, Another Planet
by Steve Dollar 
Everyone, it seems, wants to hate him, but I could only
laugh along with the rest of the audience at Fantastic Fest last month when
Lars von Trier described the introductory flourish of his new film: "It borders on kitsch, it's almost unbearable." Von Trier says and does a lot of crazy stuff, which can lead to compulsive disasters (
getting canned at Cannes), tattoos on his knuckles that spell out the word "Fuck," or add to a perverse appreciation for his artistic process. And he's right about the eight-minute introduction to
Melancholia. The surreal fugue, shot by cinematographer
Manuel Alberto Claro, pivots around
Kirsten Dunst in a wedding dress, running in slow motion as gray tendrils float up from the ground to tangle her up. The prelude to Richard Wagner's
Tristan und Isolde, which the film returns to again and again, serves as a rapturous soundtrack with its
unsettling opening passage, as a series of images evoke either transcendence or cataclysm in a style akin to the stagey suburban tableaux of photographer
Gregory Crewdson (himself inspired by the movies) and the uncanny visions of
David Lynch.
If von Trier is sheepish about the slickness and its consonance with, say, some high-end promotional video for a fashion designer, he's also a long, long way from the
Dogme 95 provocations of films like
The Idiots. Maybe he?s cringing on the inside, but in a mere eight minutes he creates something of a spellbinding beauty?a flash-forward of sorts, which concludes, of course, with an apocalyptic collision of planets?that can nail a viewer to their seat for the next two hours, thinking about Dunst in that luminous aura, conducting electromagnetic waves through her fingertips.
Where can a movie go from
there? Well, to a grandiose wedding reception at the same seaside golf resort that provided the lush,
Marienbad-esque landscape for the previous scenes. Dunst is Justine, a bride stripped bare by her impossible depression, whose destructive gravitational pull will cause her to sabotage everything on this night of nights. Shot with a bracing use of handheld camera, this segment of the film is a kind of throwback to vintage von Trier, navigating through a gallery of eccentric characters, each representing a fragment of Justine's life: the randy old father (John Hurt), the ice-queen mother who disapproves of marriage on principle (
Charlotte Rampling), her boss from the ad agency (and her new husband's best man) who's still trying to pin her down on a tagline (
Stellan Skarsgard), her thoroughly smitten and totally clueless groom (
Alexander Skarsgard), the stiff-collared and filthy rich brother-in-law who's hosting the whole shebang at his castle-like estate (
Kiefer Sutherland), their fastidious factotum "Little Father" (
Jesper Christensen), the gravely offended wedding planner who won't look her in the face (
Udo Kier), and so on, but most essentially her sister Claire (
Charlotte Gainsbourg), whose role as caregiver/puppet-master becomes clear from the outset as Justine spirals through an endless evening of forced smiles and lapses into a fathomless psychic funk.
The superb cast keeps threatening to turn the affair into a comedy of manners, a social anatomy lesson, in which we will learn the unique way that this particular family is unhappy, but the levity is repeatedly punctured by Justine's desolate interludes. In one of them, she stands out by a sand trap gazing up at the sky through a telescope, marveling at a strange new blue star. It haunts her, even as she begins to fall apart, and rearranges the art books in her sister's reading room, putting away the images of modern abstraction and opening the pages to scenes of Brueghelesque horror.
It's no wonder Justine's little nephew calls her, with impossible innocence and affection, "Auntie Dealbreaker." This first hour or so displays a virtuoso at work, and Dunst showing the audience resources that no one's ever asked her to tap into, having to portray a sort of radiant blank, sinking into a whirlpool while everyone around her is soaring high. Unlike those trendy Hollywood comedies about the Tao of screwing up (
Bad Teacher,
The Hangover or?heh?
Bridesmaids) that finally supply soft landings for their hopeless loser protagonists, this one shoots with real bullets. But there are bigger things to worry about.
One catastrophe forecasts another. In part two of the film, that twinkling blue star now has a name: Melancholia, a planet 12 times the size of Earth which is on course for an imminent "fly by," although the widespread suspicion is that the worlds are going to smack together like a pair of billiard balls. It's the end of the world as we know it,
but Justine feels fine. For once, her doom and gloom is in sync with everyone else, and after a period of near-catatonia back at the manse, she is roused by the protective Claire through the miracle of homemade meat loaf, long hot baths and galloping horse-rides through the bucolic grounds as the camera floats, omniscient, in the clouds above them. In one of the film's indelible moments, Claire comes upon Justine laying against a riverbank, nude in the moonlight, resplendent as a Pre-Raphaelite virgin?a touch of primal scenery that echoes the mythic feminine in the same way that Gainsbourg's bewitched character did in
Antichrist. It's a more complicated portion of the film because that camera hovers almost exclusively around the sisters, giving Claire's anxieties more play, and characterizes her relationship to Justine with allusions to Bergman, while subtly evoking a sense of dread mixed with wonder as Melancholia looms ever larger in the sky. (Von Trier even has the little boy concoct a device, resembling some shamanic tool, out of sticks and twigs that acts as a gauge, measuring the planet's approach). Much as in Lynch's films, the sound design is crucial: An incessant, trebly whooshing noise simmers like the rush of steam out of a stove pot, charging the atmosphere as if heralding a storm. The effect works so well it prompted sense memories of my own childhood, taping up the windows before a hurricane arrived (and making a jailbreak to run around in the yard during the "eye," when the winds briefly subside).
As the situation goes from bad to worse, Justine is finally justified. Claire wants to cling to normalcy and greet the eternal with a glass of wine and some candlelight. "You know what I think of your plan?" Justine says, in a line that sounds piped in direct from the director's nervous system. "It's a piece of shit... Why don't we meet on the fucking toilet." No longer the turd in the punchbowl, Justine finally describes the world as it actually is and no one's going to argue with her. She's von Trier's surrogate, and perhaps it?s a colossal act of hubris to conflate one's depression with a literal earth-shattering event, but if that's going to happen then don't pull any punches. Ultimately, von Trier turns cosmic obliteration into something magical and terrifying, turning the unspeakable and even absurd into the mesmerizing and majestic. Uncle Fuck Knuckle strikes again.
[Melancholia is now available on demand, and begins a limited theatrical release on November 11. For playdates and more info, visit the Magnolia Pictures website.] 
Posted by ahillis at November 6, 2011 7:00 AM
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