Melancholia

Saw Melancholia, a very pretty film by Lars Von Trier. It's a high-concept sci-fi movie about two sisters, Justine and Claire. The film is composed of two halves, the first focusing on Justine on her wedding night at a sumptuous castle-like hotel. She smiles and hangs on the neck of her fiance, but when she's hugging him, her face goes dead over his shoulder. She constantly sneaks away from the noise and the fun to be alone. At one point, in some kind of art-display-room, she angrily tears down the complex minimalist pictures and replaces them with paintings by Bruegel and Bosch and Caravaggio. She's clearly in some kind of deep and barely-hidden depression. Her antics finally spoil the wedding completely and it's called off, the guests leaving in confusion and disarray.

In part two, we focus more on Claire who must care for a Justine who is by this point so depressed that she can hardly get out of bed anymore. At this point we learn of a planet called Melancholia which is headed towards earth. I belive the metaphor to be obvious: that the planet is Justine's depression. There's debate among physicists whether this is truly the end of the world, or merely a close call.

The film forces us to stay in Justine's presence for a long time. At first there's some romance to this beautiful but depressed woman, but as time passes, we begin to feel the reality of hanging out with someone who clearly does not want to go on living. I imagine many critics reacted as they would to a real severely depressed person, with frustration and mounting impatience. The planet is actually in the sky however and as it looms Claire begins to fall apart as well.

So, not a cheery film, but it is simply gorgeously shot. The opening of the film is a montage of achingly slow, beautifully composed shots. Justine in her wedding dress, walking through a forest, tangled a fisherman's net. A horse rears and falls over. Justine walking with a young boy on her hip, her legs sinking up to the knee into the earth. Justine raising her hands as lighting crawls up her fingers like a Jacob's ladder. They depict tableaux of weariness and depression, but also of a strange beauty.

The film reminds me a lot of the work of Tarkovsky, famous for high-concept but grounded sci fi, whose work is similarly slow and hypnotic. Indeed, in what I consider to be a sort of hat-tip, this painting appears in Melancholia and is also heavily featured in Solaris. I don't think this film will exactly appeal to fans of high-concept sci-fi, but functions well as a drama. It's very slow, but then it's also very pretty, so there's that. Far more comfortable than most of Von Trier's oeuvre.