Melancholia (2011)

I can't get my head around Melancholia. Or, in some respects I can, and some things just baffle me. I watched the movie a week ago, and I still don't know quite what to say. The film starts on the grandest note possible. The thundering intro to Tristand & Isolde rattles the viewer's bowels. We see images in slow-motion. People are moving around, slowly, slowly. A small child. Two women. A horse. But we also see a planet moving towards Earth, and, after a long, long time, colliding into it. This long prelude is on a par with the most bombastic, yet strangely dazzling, scenes from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Lars von Trier is not the man of understatement here. APOCALYPSE is spelled in capital letters. But that doesn't make me any more convinced I know in what way this is a film about the end of the world.

What I find perfectly rewarding is the drastic changes in styles that occur several times during the film. The Wagner-fuelled prologue is very different from what comes next; an upper-class wedding is depicted using a wobbly, nervous cinematography. Early on, we get a sense everything is not quite right. The bride makes several attempts to escape from the wedding dinner, among other, worse, things, and her parents can't stop hating each other and acting like small children. It's all a nightmare of dysfunctional relations, really, too much for a desperate wedding planner (Udo Kier!) who tries to keep up appearances. In the last segment of the film, the pace is slowed down and we follow the bride and her sister's family in the days after the catastrophic wedding. The planet from the prologue is re-introduced. The planet Melancholia is known to approach Earth, but according to "reliable scientists" it will pass by Earth on a safe distance. Each family member deals with the news in her own way. Justine, the bride, is wrapped up in depression. We don't really see her react in any way, in relation to the strange planet or anything else, for that matter, until the very end. Her sister Claire takes care of her, while at the same time trying not to check the latest news updates on the Internet. She is a down-to-earth person who just want things to work out, but that planet keeps her awake at night. Her husband (who resembles the male protagonist in Antichrist) represents himself as the voice of reason, of science and clear-headed sobriety.

What makes this film bearable, good even, is that for all its overblown end-of-the-world scenarios, for all its cheap metaphors and tired clichés of the mad woman eating jelly with her hands - the film takes a stand to represent depression in a novel way, not as an irrational aberration but as a place where you will see reality from a certain point of view. For that reason, the ending scene has an eerie beuty to it. I say this even though I'm not sure I should buy von Tries defense of the depressed. But in this health-crazed culture where each of us is encouraged to tread through life in sound knowledge of "business being business", von Trier's film provides a refreshing protest.

There are even more reasons for watching it. Charlotte Rampling is excellent, as always. Even though one could lament some overly beautific images, I really dig the film's sharp contrasts, making the erratic cinematography of the beginning nudge with the tranquility of the later segment. Melancholia has some weak parts and some pieces of dialogue are just out of order in being so, so pretentious - but it still is a film I've been thinking about all week, re-enacting some images in my mind's eye.