Melancholia

I don't like this film, nor do I love it. I won't watch it again. But it is a 10/10 movie for making me feel things so intense I haven't felt in a long time.

This movie is about depression, and it's portrayed in a beautiful way. Sometimes it's achingly slow, other times a ton of things happen all at once. But the dread remains.

The movie is divided in two parts; Justine and Claire. And their ways of dealing with life is really different. I won't spoil anything but do know that both sections intertwine but don't necessarily deal with each other very directly.

Lars von Trier is a master at making movies that are both equally beautiful and destructive. I finished watching it two hours ago but the pain in my chest hasn't gone away. And that to me is quite the accomplishment. He knows how to portray pain in a way that is so accurate it's scary.

No one probably working today can imbue the image of a bride pissing in the middle of a golf course with the afterglow of existential soul-searching like Trier does here - well, there was Peter Greenaway at one point but I haven't kept track. Side by side the romantic, the visceral, the transcendent, each one perversely subverting the others. But, having searched and yearned, eventually with Trier we arrive at nothing. Nothing in the predominantly Western, post-enlightenment worldview that has pushed god to the side and seated the mind in his place. Nothing is too much for Trier then, because nothing satisfies the mind; everything that is touched by humanity is shown to be randomly bubbling up from some cold, infertile void.

But this is the thing with Trier, why it's so troubling to dismiss him; even though he makes art about a meaningless world - and so why pay attention? - he remains a powerful poet of cinema. So he is an anti-Tarkovsky, which perhaps explains why he opens the film with The Hunters in the Snow - a painting used in Solyaris - burning, and why horses are forced to kneel in the face of petulant violence. Whereas Tarkovsky understood the universe to be centered inside, and used that to sculpt space and metaphor from that center, Trier is grounded nowhere; so he resolves to orbit from one periphery to the next, nicely framing for us anxieties that we can relate to but with no deeper insight of their mechanism.

But now and then he works from a powerful set of ideas. Here it is the mirrored metaphor; the pain and suffering of life on earth as mirrored on the cosmic level, and our hope that this suffering looming above will just pass us by. It is not sci-fi in any way you may recognize, or anymore than Tree of Life is.

It does not work like that, of course, that is a given. So we are placed in the shoes of the woman - the bride in her wedding reception, where life is ritually supposed to become orderly, assuring, meaningful - and forced to make our way for the occasion wearing a forced smile, and hoping the pain will just pass us by. Yes, it does not work like that. The mother is haughty and domineering, the father sloppy and indiscreet. Everyone else is busy performing their roles, going through motions, speeches, confrontations which are often funny but always grueling to see. So,with the soul unsupervised, the perfect occasion for happiness inexplicably crumbles from inside.

The second part is about the sister, who already has the perfectly happy life or is supposed to. But again, of course, it doesn't work. Suffering, uncertainty hangs above that we can't simply brush off. So it is the dawning of acceptance that governs this part of the film; but, properly at least for Trier and in a way that should make sense, we're shown the impossibility of that acceptance. Faces are increasingly bewildered, affections grow distant, motions agitated.

A lot of my distaste for what Trier does, is exemplified in a scene where the depressed sister confronts the other; instead of reciprocating the nurture and support, however obligatory it may have seemed at the time, she preys on her weakness. Why drink wine in the veranda and pretend none of this is going to happen? Why not?

But the acceptance is handled with so much nihilism, a sort of comfortable noncommittal, that I want to take a step back. No equanimity flows from Trier's emptiness, and so the vision is useless for me. I want films embedded in a world that matters in some way. Yes, we're all going to face an inscrutable fate, but it's one thing to frame this with compassion, another thing altogether to frame with contempt or cold satisfaction.

So it is apt to compare with Tree of Life on more than just the cosmic level of wheels whirring life into pattern; there is the sense of emptying out, the search for a true face that restores meaning. Malick goes the extra mile though, he reconciles into the impermanence of all things and from there a deep, loving humanity. Trier is simply left aghast at it. Sex is a vice and the mind is unable to cope; so he merely casts the characters away at the precipice. But not before ironically rendering human faith as a magical cave made from fire sticks.

Oh, he captures the drab, grueling unlife of depression well, no wonder as he knows from personal experience. And a google search seems to yield a nod at Filippino filmmaker Lav Diaz, that was pretty unexpected.

There are aesthetically-minded pleasures though that you should see; planets caressing each other like faces below, a bird's eye view of horses galloping. Some of it borders on kitsch when Kirsten Dunst is photographed naked beneath the moonglow, the schadenfreude is so earnestly conceived.

And there is the parting image; I don't know how much of it was the theater, technology, but it swell up into the most deafening, soul-crushing crescendo. I could feel particles being dislocated inside of me. But considering what comes before, it's not something I wanted to swim into but let wash. It's fitting for Trier though, the wagnerian sound of the void washing life empty.

It is a powerful work, don't just take it lightly. But I urge you to meditate against it.

Oh yes, it is all going to end sooner or later. But, as a principle, I urge you to never settle for a destructive void in your life: in the midst of blistering destruction, try to see around you what the Eastern mystics knew as the universe of 10,000 beautiful things trampled by god Shiva in his final dance. Let yourself be filled with a profound sadness that is joy for the 10,000 beautiful things around you.

There's a serious polarity in the reviews for this film,and I'm not surprised. If you've ever suffered depression this bleak movie will hit hard, and you'll pick up on all of the subtle messages it sends out. It's done so well it can't be anything other than achingly familiar. The despondency, and the frustration the sufferer feels at their own despondency, in particular, is well conveyed.

Unfortunately I think a large chunk of the people who've seen this film (and there aren't many who have, sadly) went to it expecting a slightly arty apocalypse movie. It's not a smarter Deep Impact. The (blue) planet Melancholia is just a metaphor for depression. Unrelenting and irresistible, Melancholia has the main character in its thrall.

For those who don't "get" this movie, no it's not a pretentious, pseudo intellectual flick. Rather it's a well crafted take on the fine detail of a subject matter that you have been fortunate enough to not have had to understand. Long may that be the case.

Melancholia is LVT's Wagnerian opera. Justine is a mythological creation. She is the white goddess, Diana bathing, la Belle Dame Sans Merci, Cassandra tormented by futurity. It ends in Gottedammerung, the destruction of the world.

The Cannes jury was right to honour it. In 2, 10 or 100 years this will be manifestly THE film of 2011, capturing as it does this precise historical moment, on the cusp of epochs. More than just an economic crisis, or even the end of Western capitalism, or the American Century, or of Europe - though it is all that - it is the consummation in fire of all we have ever known. Leaders and experts sit mesmerised and powerless, making reassuring noises, or setting aside puny provisions; taking shelter in denial or custom. While Melancholia and Earth act out their dance of death; gravity, the most ineluctable force in the universe, does its work.

Justine, being incapable of happiness, is therefore incapable of illusion. She has always known. Herself untouched by affect, by human assimilation or persuasion, she writes the killer tag lines which manipulate others. Having a damaged soul, she suffers from a disorder of perception - she sees things as they actually are. She knows precisely how many beans are in the jar -like those who called the top of the Dow Jones index, at 12807 exactly. On one level, she represents the spirit of financialisation, the final, hottest white dwarf phase of capitalism, quantifying, inhumane, ultra-competitive (seen also in Skaarsgard's brutal ad boss, and in the brother-in-law who paid for the wedding - "an arm and a leg, for most people" -he means it literally I think - chilling!) And, like the Sybil, Justine wants to die. She wills the destruction of herself and everything else. 'The Earth is evil.'

LVT is the holy idiot of European cinema. Much as Justine destroys her stellar career, then hours later, in the garden, consciously and irrevocably obliterates her marriage and future happiness, so LVT - in the most perfect example of parallel process - in his acceptance speech at Cannes compulsively befouls himself, his credibility, future opportunities, his film and all associated with it. (Poor Dunst, beside him. Did she always know? I wonder.)

Which brings me to Kirsten Dunst.Once the all-American teenage sweetie in some of my favourite films.(The US invented the teenager, much as the English Victorians invented childhood, and its richest and most creative seam of film and TV deal with this stage of life. In a way, America is the world's teenager; and all teenagers are Americans by proxy.) In fact, Dunst is German-American, with all the ancestral baggage that implies. (Read Sylvia Plath's 'Daddy' if you don't know what I mean). Beneath the apple-pie sunny exterior of her teen roles, there was always something remote and uncanny about her beauty. And now, with teen / young adult roles behind her, this strangeness, this well, German-ness, is exposed. In the riveting opening shots of 'Melancholia' she looks like Marlene Dietrich - unheimlich, fascinating. Like la Belle Dame Sans Merci, she takes possession of a man through his unconscious: like the groom in the film, he will follow her, exchanging all that is dear - home, family and hope of happiness - for bitterness and despair.

In the scene in the limo, the earliest, lightest part of the story, she seems American, in accent, face, body, She becomes less American , more northern European, and ultimately less like a human being at all, as her story unwinds. Those who criticise the inconsistency in her accent are missing the point. The change is about the character, not her nationality, which is purposely vague. (In fact, in what country does the film take place? Would you ask that question of 'the Ring'?)

I get the impression that just as Lars is working through some issues around his German-ness – hence the Wagnerianism -, so is Dunst, which must have made his Cannes performance doubly excruciating. (I hear she wants to be called 'Keersten' now, pronounced the German way.) For the girl who has been being other people superbly well from her childhood, it seems to me that Dunst the adult truly exposes something painfully real of herself in this film. ('Exposing' is the right word in every way.)

And she pulls it off. The film is stunning. She is stunning, and thoroughly deserves Best Actress. Bravo, Lars von Trier!

This is not an easy movie to watch. It's tough from the very beginning - a prologue prequel with music by Wagner and an apocalyptic perspective. Any movie in which dead birds fall from the sky in the first three minutes is not going to be light and fluffy.

But this movie, about deep melancholia experienced by Justine (Kirstin Dunst), the principal character, and the melancholia of the potential end of life itself, is an artistic triumph. Great acting, great cinematography, great music. Even the sometimes puzzling plot - the post-prologue movie comes in two halves - is engrossing and pregnant with underlying meaning. The three principal characters all represent a point on the compass of human feelings: Depression, anxiety, and something resembling nice normalcy. How each deals with the apocalypse is a well-threaded effort.

While the movie is dark, it is by no means humorless. The wedding that occupies the first half of the movie has a great deal of fun alongside the depression.

Not a movie for everyone, and a bit too long, but if you watch it, stick with it. You may not want to see it twice but you could be glad you saw it once.