Melancholia

MELANCHOLIA (Lars von Trier, 2011)

If ever there was a director prepared to make a film about depression and the end of the world, Danish provocateur Lars von Trier would be the one.  His well-publicized battles with depression informed his notorious previous effort, ANTICHRIST, and pervade his latest, MELANCHOLIA.  

After a prologue that beautifully envisions a terrible end, MELANCHOLIA splits into two halves, each devoting attention to the sisters Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg).  Justine has wrestled with depression for a long time, and not even her wedding day, which comprises the film’s first half, can keep her in high spirits.  

The title is also the name of a massive, newly discovered planet that had been hiding behind the sun.  Scientists expect its orbit to pass by close to Earth, but in MELANCHOLIA’s second half Claire fears that this heavenly body will smash our planet to bits.  

Words associated with depression, like dreary, bleak, and sluggish, aren’t applicable to MELANCHOLIA.  Manuel Alberto Claro’s gorgeous cinematography produces slick, saturated colors in the prologue; warm, deep browns and yellows at the reception; and light and hazy blues and white in the second half.  

Considering its subject matter, MELANCHOLIA is quite funny, especially during the wedding reception.  Von Trier, who is likely riffing on fellow Dogme 95 filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg’s THE CELEBRATION, has great fun observing a festive ceremony fall apart.  Udo Kier’s fussy wedding planner, Charlotte Rampling’s grouchy mother of the bride, and a peeved Kiefer Sutherland, who never fails to remind the necessary parties that he’s paying for it all, highlight the prickly humor around this supposedly happy occasion.

While existence hangs in the balance in MELANCHOLIA, von Trier’s fatalistic embrace of impending doom is starkly beautiful and strangely reassuring.  Without question Justine is the director’s surrogate, someone who finds comfort in the awareness that years of despondency and anxiety were not for naught.  Dunst’s remarkable performance conveys the emotional swings and physical effects from her long, internal struggle and the peace she makes with it.  Now that her worst possible fear can be confirmed, what else is there to do but submit to the inevitable?  In a film full of strong images, its final one is most striking for what it says about accepting those things that cannot be changed.  

Grade: A-

Antichrist

ANTICHRIST (Lars von Trier, 2009)

In ANTICHRIST the couple played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, simply dubbed He and She in the credits, mourn the accidental death of their son. He processes and deals with his grief, but her method of coping with the tragedy produces emotional paralysis and a path toward madness.

As a therapist, he has his own ideas about what's best for his wife and chooses to oversee her recovery rather than let her lay medicated in the hospital. He uncovers that the seeds of her depression and fear come from nature, so off they go to a remote cabin in the woods in a place they refer to as Eden in an attempt to cure her.

There's a lot to unpack from ANTICHRIST, a head-spinning achievement and nightmarish hallucination of a film. Purely as a visual and visceral experience, puckish writer-diretor Lars von Trier produces an enormously powerful phantasmagoria that deals with and reproduces the effects of fear and depression.

On a technical level ANTICHRIST is superb at casting an unsettling dream-like atmosphere. The camera lens slowly but gradually distorts the lush yet hostile landscape of the woods and garden from which she once ran and to which they return. Falling acorns clatter on the roof of the cabin as though hell itself is raining down. Even as a viewer, nowhere and nothing feels safe in this movie. ANTICHRIST is, in a way, the ultimate horror film, one in which the natural world offers evil instead of salvation.

A major point for discussion is the rampant misogyny that von Trier offers up seriously, although who's to say whether the presentation is to be read as authorial agreement. After all, von Trier is a provocateur of the highest order. He goes so far as to replace the title's last letter with the T-like symbol of Venus. Coupled with Gainsbourg's fierce, uncompromising performance, the link of the female with evil is established, but in my mind von Trier is using gender archetypes rather than saying something about womankind.

Biblical allusions to Adam and Eve are mostly implicit in ANTICHRIST, but therein lies what may be the key to the film. Nature or mother nature (in female terms) or human nature (in general) is sinful. Eden is no longer a hospitable place. The title conjures images of a devilish figure in opposition to God, but for von Trier the Antichrist of the film's name is human frailty.

At least on the first time around ANTICHRIST seems beyond an evaluation. Whatever the grade, it's a film that demands to be seen, at least by those select viewers who can handle the extreme nature of the material.

Grade: B-