That's all, folks (for mankind, not this blog).

Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia is an audacious, earnest drama intended (I assume) to illustrate a simple truth about the human condition, that those best prepared to deal with man-made rituals created to instill a sense of meaning and regularity into an apparently meaningless and irregular existence are least best-suited to deal with the potential collapse of the structure those rituals support.
The film has two acts and two protagonists. The first act is set on the wedding night of Kirsten Dunst’s Justine, a depressed twenty-something unable to survive the evening’s proceedings without disappearing regularly to take bubble baths and have sex with newly hired co-workers. Von Trier staggers scenes featuring a spaced-out Dunst wandering around in a funk with those featuring the wedding’s guests, among them Justine’s overbearing sister Claire (played by Charlotte Gainsbourg) and vindictive mother Gaby (Charlotte Rampling).
Taken on its own, the first half of Melancholia is a frustrating piece of filmmaking. The camera roams about Justine’s sister’s estate (upon which the ceremony is being held) somewhat aimlessly, there’s little in the way of dramatic tension, and viewers already aware of the film’s apocalyptic bent will doubt the script’s ability to make us care about its protagonists by the time the titular doomsday planet smashes Earth to smithereens.
They will be wrong.
As act two begins, Justine has returned to the scene of her wedding. It seems that a newly discovered planet, hiding for god-knows-how-long behind the sun, is due to either collide with or narrowly pass by Earth’s rotation within the next 48 hours. Still depressed, Justine joins Claire, her stuffy millionaire husband John (played by a quiet, raspy Kiefer Sutherland), and their son Leo to watch the (possible) final hours of their planet's existence play out in each other’s company. John doesn’t believe the warnings about Melancholia, and he tries with some success to calm his wife’s rattled nerves. Justine, however, believes that mankind’s end is imminent, and also tells her sister, in the act’s sole misstep, that humans are alone in the universe, knowledge she is privy to because she “knows things”.
Although the character’s final acts are played out in a beautiful slow-motion montage that opens the film, the climax to Melancholia is affecting nevertheless (or perhaps because of). Only when we are fully aware of what Melancholia represents to the film’s characters do we understand the frustrating choices Von Trier made in Act One (throughout which are hidden several little plot points that only pay off later, a nice bit of misdirection that only works because of the filmmaker’s seemingly random Dogma-esque directing style). To Justine, Earth’s destruction is a natural conclusion to its story; it does not cause her dismay because she understands that existence has no greater meaning. To her sister, however, the end of our existence is unfathomable, an unfair climax to her life and belief system. Melancholia represents death both literal and spiritual.
Although Von Trier has a world-view (universe-view?) that could kindly be described as pessimistic, Melancholia is not a nihilistic film thematically. The director seems to be making as much of a statement about the obvious fragile nature of existence and our ability to cope with its inevitable end as he is commenting on the perceived meaning of said existence. The film’s relatively uneventful opening half serves to lull the audience into a false sense of comfort, something we only become aware of as the characters’ tense final hours play out in Act Two.
Egs Posted on
Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 04:04AM 




