If “Melancholia” hadn’t turned out to be one of the most arresting and exciting movies of the year, the film’s main claim to fame might’ve been director Lars von Trier’s joking comments at the Cannes Film Festival in May.
Von Trier is a full-time mischiefmaker and put-on artist, who blabbed something at the “Melancholia” press conference about sympathizing with Hitler (the implication being, what movie director doesn’t identify with a tyrannical dictator, at some point?).
Of course this comment became an immediate scandal, and von Trier was banned from the festival, and blah blah blah.
So, yes, Lars von Trier can be a jackass at times. He also happens to be a prodigiously talented artist who makes movies nobody else could make, “Melancholia” being a vivid case in point.
The film is divided into two parts: The first surveys a fancy wedding reception at a country house, where the bride, Justine (Kirsten Dunst), appears to be slowly and surely losing it. This part is a black comedy of manners.
The second section also is set at the house, shortly thereafter, when the clinically depressed Justine returns to stay with her sister (Charlotte Gainsbourg, late of von Trier’s “Antichrist”) and brother-in-law (Kiefer Sutherland).
But we left out something important. The movie begins with a spellbinding set of slow-motion images, which appear to herald a natural catastrophe of apocalyptic proportions. After that, there are references to an asteroid, or possibly a planet, that is on a collision course with Earth.
From this setting, von Trier weaves an ominous experience, part psychological study, part science fiction. And it is an “experience,” more than it is a conventional three-act movie: “Melancholia” moves at its own very odd, elongated stride, like someone trying to walk underwater, and it presents images that vary from the curious (the bride pauses to relieve herself on a golf course at night) to the spectacular (a horse keels over beneath a sky full of northern lights).
Kristen Dunst won the best actress prize at Cannes, and she’s very convincingly haunted. Alexander Skarsgard plays her groom, and Charlotte Rampling and Udo Kier contribute deft humor in the movie’s wickedly funny first section.
The actors are all part of von Trier’s conception, which includes lush samplings of Wagner music. “Melancholia” is the kind of movie that used to settle into a nice long arthouse run, drawing audiences interested in tripping on its imagery or deciphering its puzzle. I hope that happens here, because this is bold, tightrope-walking movie-making of the most vertiginous kind.
“Melancholia” (four stars)
A trippy film from director Lars von Trier, in which the disastrous wedding reception of a depressed bride (Kirsten Dunst) is merely the precursor to a much larger apocalypse. Haunting, blackly funny and psychologically acute, the movie’s a truly disconcerting experience.
Rated: R for language, nudity.
Showing: Harvard Exit.
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