Lars von Trier's "Melancholia' (2nd review)

As genres go, disaster films have thrived since the movies began and the Man in the Moon took a sock in the eye from Georges Méliès. Urban dystopias (Metropolis), serial killers or vampires on the loose (M, Dracula), epidemics (Panic in the Streets), earthquakes (San Francisco), space invaders (War of the Worlds) and post-apocalyptic road warriors (Blade Runner) have all added to the repertoire. As Alfred Hitchcock so often told us, we like to be scared.

The atomic bomb added a new dimension to the form. For the first time, it seemed, planetary destruction was not simply a religious or science fiction fantasy, but a genuine, imminent possibility.

The Bomb hasn't gone away, but it's become clear during the past 20 years that ordinary industrial pollution can do the job of rendering the Earth uninhabitable (or at least profoundly unpleasant) just as well. We've quarantined the Bomb behind a scrim of treaties and Great Power relationships (so far), but, as the collapse of the Kyoto protocols has recently made apparent, we haven't begun to make peace with Mother Nature. No doubt Hollywood will profit from this failure.

Of the latest screen offerings, 2012, based on the prediction in the Mayan Long Count that we're due for an ugly surprise this year— uglier even than Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum— is the most conventional. At a subtler level, Jeff Nichols's Take Shelter suggests that our skies will soon turn wrathful.

Its hero, whose visions alert him to the impending catastrophe, decides to dig a family shelter in his backyard, much to the bemusement or concern of his family and neighbors. The resemblance of this primitive burrowing instinct to the fallout shelters popular in the 1950s (and still beloved of Dick Cheney government types today) will be apparent.

Rogue planet

Now we have the high-end Melancholia to suggest that life on Earth can and actually should end, down to the humblest bacterium. To be sure, this isn't a Hollywood product but the concoction of the Danish director Lars von Trier, whose production company, Zentropa, turns out both serious dramas featuring female leads (Emily Watson in Breaking the Waves; Nicole Kidman in Dogville) and sophisticated porn for the European market.

The agent of destruction in this case is a rogue planet, the "Melancholia" of the film's title, a reference that goes back to Albrecht Dürer's famous woodcut, and the Romantic tradition of doomed, saturnine artists of which it is the precursor. Such artists, both sensitive and prophetic, became stand-ins for humanity as such in the 19th Century, the idea being that the profoundest creativity was inextricably mixed with the impulse to self-destruction— transcendence as apocalypse.

Melancholia is thus ourselves, our projected fantasy of annihilation. How literally are we to take it in Von Trier's film?

When killer asteroids approach in conventional disaster films, we blast them off course with atomic detonations staged in outer space (at last, a use for the Bomb). But there can be no question of that with Melancholia; we can only hope that it will give us a pass.

Beauty without biology

As this planet looms closer and closer, its mottled blue and white surface seems a mirror image of our own planet, sans continents and life forms— in other words, beauty undefiled by biology. It approaches us not as an accident but as destiny, and of course destiny doesn't change course at the last moment.

The film's Romantic framework is evident in its operatic form. It consists of an eight-minute prologue of slowly unfolding images Ó la Terrence Malick, with the prelude to Wagner's Tristan und Isolde accompanying it on the soundtrack. The images, like musical themes sounded in an overture, will recur as the film progresses.

The first and most striking of these is the head of the film's heroine, Justine (Kirsten Dunst), whose eyes open and then somberly stare outward as birds fall slowly from a presumed sky behind and beside her. The leisureliness of this is Wagnerian too, as if to warn us that weighty topics are about to be discussed.

What follows are two loosely connected acts, respectively titled "Justine" and "Claire," the latter being the name of Justine's elder sister (Charlotte Gainsbourg). The slow overture gives way to rapid jump-cutting in "Justine," which depicts Justine's catered wedding reception at an unspecified but Baltic-looking estate (actually, Swedish).

Wedding disaster

Claire is throwing the reception for Justine, with Claire's scientist-husband John (Kiefer Sutherland) somewhat reluctantly footing the bill. Justine arrives late with her new husband, Michael (Alexander Skarsgard), a nice enough fellow without a clue about the family dynamic he's about to enter, or about his wife's problematic character.

The delay in the couple's arrival is explained by the lateness of their hired limousine, but Justine becomes moody and abstracted as the festivities proceed and then disappears for long stretches, at one point for a nice soak in a tub, at another for a furious bout of sex with a perfect stranger. The reception turns into a disaster of its own, and the baffled Michael eventually disappears, as if realizing himself a supernumerary.

This scene contains more than a suggestion of Wagner's Twilight of the Gods, with the rented estate a dead-end Valhalla and the vaguely decadent and corrupt celebrants a passing order that is soon to be swept into oblivion. The point is clinched when the bride's eccentric mother (Charlotte Rampling) makes a Bad Fairy speech declaring that she believes neither in marriage nor religion: that is, neither a here nor a hereafter.

Awaiting Doomsday

The second act takes place at some indeterminate point afterward. Justine, with no place to go— she has also quit her job— is living on the same estate with Claire, John and their small son, Leo. Melancholia is rapidly approaching, a second and ever-larger moon in the night sky, and soon visible even by daylight.

John assures the family that it will miss Earth; he even fashions a primitive wire loop so that Claire can measure its retreat. He knows better, though. Claire, as a mother, is desperate to survive, but Justine quite coolly awaits Doomsday.

"Life on earth is evil," she says, meaning perhaps the whole Darwinian comedy but surely humanity as such. "No one will miss us," she adds, although she is also certain that life is a misadventure found nowhere else in the universe. The comment suggests there is no observing deity, either.

It's an interesting point of view, given our current obsession with finding habitable planets in other galaxies. Justine means that life is an accident that ought not to be repeated, an idea that echoes the view of the French biologist Jacques Monod that life on earth is the result of a freakish chemical combination— or contamination— whose replication is too improbable to assume even among billions of star-swirls.

Between Wagner and Freud

Melancholia is a strange and poetically haunting film. Its two halves overlap but don't cohere in any conventional narrative sense, like juxtaposed worlds. This, too, suggests that the looming sister planet that is about to collide with us is a projection of our own deep-seated desire for self-immolation.

Wagner calls this Liebestod in Tristan; and Freud, recasting the idea in the mythopoetic terms of late psychoanalytic theory, termed it Thanatos, the instinct for final dissolution that is inseparable from the life-force of Eros. The film's end is dreamlike, as the family survivors huddle under an improvised tent of poles (erected by whom?) and await their fate.

The acting in Melancholia is uniformly excellent, but Justine must carry the film, and Kirsten Dunst is remarkable in the role, her face a constant play of shifting but disconnected emotions. It's quite the opposite of method acting, where the actor tries to construct a character from within whose authenticity comes from lived experience.

Justine is a mixture of the allegorical and the seemingly realistic, with no clear indication of which we're apt to see from scene to scene. Such a performance— especially with the Bergman-style close-ups that Von Trier favors— depends on the closest collaboration and dependence between actor and director.

Nazi humor

It must have been an even more shocking turnabout for Dunst when, sitting beside Von Trier at the Cannes Film Festival last spring, she heard him lapse into the assertion that he was a Nazi and Hitler a misunderstood figure. The dismay and at last horror her face recorded had nothing to do with acting.

Von Trier hastily retracted his remarks, attributing them to "Danish humor," and they seem not to have affected his box office. Wagner's anti-Semitism doesn't hurt his gross at the Met, either. Great artists—and lesser ones—aren't immune from reprehensible beliefs and boorish conduct.

I don't think I'd necessarily care to share a dinner table with Von Trier (who grew up, incidentally, erroneously believing that he was part Jewish). But Melancholia, in its darkly idiosyncratic way, speaks to our present moment, which is one of art's functions.

A rogue planet won't solve our problems. Whether we possess the will to accommodate ourselves to the one we're on— and whether, perhaps, we really wish to— is the question Von Trier invites us to ponder.♦


To read another review by Jake Blumgart, click here.