Melancholia / Melancholia (Bilingual)

Danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier crafts movies somewhat reflective of his own character, and experiences. In Antichrist [Blu-ray], a psychiatrist, and his wife, take a vacation, in the woods, and he has concerns that his wife's psychotherapy is not working, while both contend with an unthinkable loss. Lars struggles with depression have been well documented, as have his awkward comments about Nazism at the Cannes Film Festival, which have become a youtube phenomenon. Melancholia was crafted from a depressed state.

It's not difficult to see how personal experience emerges as art, in Melancholia, with depression being represented through a feminine lens mostly through the character Justine, played by Kirsten Dunst. The movie opens with a stunning five minute visual sequence with no dialogue, and a Wagnerian music soundtrack. As this happened, immediately I began to compare it to Tree of Life, although it's the antithetical, instead of creation, birth, and optimism we have a mood piece with destructive overtones.

As the movie begins we see snippets of a story unfolding in slow motion, snippets which will be developed later in the story, a woman in a wedding dress, a pretty face leeched of all energy, a horse unable to stand sinking in mud, and two planets about to collide.

When the movie proper begins we see a bride happy on her wedding day, at a castle in the country, with a 19 hole golf course.

As the evening dwindles down, her happy countenance diffuses, with self serving bitter cynical comments by her mother, played by Charlotte Rampling, directed at marriage. As someone prone to depression, she becomes assailed by lethargy and melancholy. Her sister, Claire played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, comforts her. As the facade begins to fall apart, she has sex with a random stranger, and a destructive confrontation with her boss, also the best man. Next morning her husband leaves her, and she has a breakdown. She remains at the castle owned by her sister, and her brother in law played by Kiefer Sutherland.

Meanwhile, a previously unknown planet Melancholia has emerged from the sun, and heads towards earth. We don't know if it will collide, and end the world or pass by. As it gets closer, its oppressive energy effects everyone, and both Claire and husband exhibit anxiety and depression, while Justine strangely becomes calmer. A mysterious scene has Claire searching a locked drawer looking for antidepressants. To whom do they belong? She, her husband or Justine?

If depression is the anticipation of loss then depressed people may be less troubled by a disastrous future, because they already anticipate loss. The prospect of the end of the world may very well be an antidepressant, as it proposes the alleviation of suffering.

The good points of this movie were its visuals, particularly the acting of Kirsten Dunst, who perfectly and convincingly plays the role of a depressed woman. She acknowldeges she would not have produced this performance without Von Trier. She won the Best Actress award at Cannes in 2011. Coupled with Charlotte Gainsbourg's performance, we have two great performances. Charlotte Gainsbourg previously won Best Actress at Cannes for her performance in Antichrist. One point of interest was the parallelsim of how horses who know nothing of the news finds themselves lacking energy, and how the proximity of Melanchol(y)a effects other peoples energy. Carl Jung said 'perception is projection.'

As someone with personal experience of the subject, I can say Von Trier represents depression effectively, and Dunst represents it accurately.

I have mixed feelings about the movie. I think it will get a mixed reaction from people. Some people will love it, and some people will hate it. If you did not like Tree of Life, you probably will not like this movie. If you did like The Tree of Life as I did you still may not like this movie. By the way The The Tree of Life won for best movie at Cannes in 2011.

Its slow pace while artistic is not necessarily engrossing. Something of the mood of the characters was conveyed to me while watching, and I had the parallel experience of feeling drained of energy at the time, although now I am glad I saw it.

Another movie somewhat similar that I absolutely loved was Another Earth. It's the story of a girl and what happens when Another Earth (Combo Blu Ray, DVD and Digital Copy) [Blu-ray] appears in the night sky. Separately reviewed.

I definitely recommend getting it as a rental before you buy, and watch Tree of Life first. I hope this was helpful.

Could be hard to watch for some. Don't expect much conventional storytelling or ending. Don't expect action. In fact, don't see this for entertainment in the usual sense. It is not uplifting. Watch it if you are enthralled by deeply personal film-making and gorgeous, dreamlike (nightmarish?) cinematography. This is more of an experience than anything you might expect from your typical Hollywood entertainment.

Lars von Trier himself has said that this film is about depression, which is part of his own personality. Those who are anxious to preserve an optimistic and "positive" outlook on life might be wise to avoid it. But then there are those more inclined to agree with Thoreau's remark: "Be it life or death, we crave only reality." And from that point of view, this film is a masterpiece.

It may seem odd to mention "reality" in connection with a story in which a science-fictional element plays a central part. In this film, "Melancholia" is not only an old-fashioned term for depression but also a planet (blue, of course) which has wandered into the solar system and, we are told, may or may not collide with Earth. In astrophysical terms, this is highly unlikely but not impossible. The main implausibility here is that nobody seems to have seen this planet coming years before, although it's much larger than Earth, because it was "behind the sun." But that's a relatively minor detail, not hard to suspend one's disbelief about. And that's worth doing, because the real focus of the story is the relationship between two sisters who respond in diametrically opposed ways to the situation presented by Melancholia.

Justine (Kirsten Dunst) is the depressive sister, and the first half of the film deals with her struggle between a promising future (it's her wedding day) and the gravity that threatens to pull her into a black hole. Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is the more normal of the two. She sometimes hates her sister for spoiling the party, but also cares about Justine enough to recognize her condition as an illness and try to help her get over it. Both Dunst and Gainsbourg are superb in their roles, and the interplay between them (not to mention the other characters) is psychologically realistic to an almost painful degree. In the second half of the film, while Justine's inner melancholia is on the wane, the planet Melancholia becomes the dominant factor in the story, transforming the relationship between the sisters. And that, in my view, is what makes this film a masterpiece, because the sisters, without ceasing to be finely drawn individuals, represent (to me at least) two different but equally essential sides of human nature.

Cinematically, this film is unusual in several ways. Most of the events and interactions of the story are shot in a quasi-documentary style with hand-held camera. Yet it's preceded by a long overture that foreshadows key elements of the story in extreme slow-motion images, accompanied by Wagnerian music (from the opera Tristan and Isolde). It's a combination of artistic Romanticism with realism that should not work, but for me only adds to the power of the film. Of three or four von Trier films i've seen, this is far and away the most engaging.

The Blu-ray (i haven't seen the DVD version) includes a fairly short but illuminating extra in which von Trier, Gainsbourg, Dunst and a psychologist comment on the story. Other extras comment on the visual style and how the effects were created. The film certainly is beautiful (both picture and sound) in 1080p. The dialogue is all in English, but there's also a version dubbed into French as well as subtitles in both languages.