Melancholia

Lars von Trier's Melancholia is the second film I've seen in the past several days that features a mysterious planet making its way to Earth, the first being Another Earth. (It is also the second film I've seen this fall featuring a Pieter Bruegel painting. See also The Mill and the Cross.) Instead of being a carbon copy of Earth, the planet here is different and called Melancholia. We first encounter it in an opening prelude which also introduces us to sisters Justine and Claire as well some foreshadowing of events that unfold later.

The screen fades in from darkness as a prelude from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde plays and Justine's (Kirsten Dunst) face appears. Her eyes slowly open revealing a doleful visage that glares back at you while birds tumble lifelessly from the sky. We cut to other images including Justine clad in her wedding gown lying in a stream and staring up into the sky and Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), a boy, and Justine all standing in a row with a mansion behind them with the sun, moon, and the new planet above. One rather harrowing image is of Claire carrying a child in her arms as she runs across a golf course in the rain. With each step her boots sink several inches into the grass. Another features Justine in profile walking along grass as tendrils emanating from off screen curl round her ankles turning a leisurely stroll into a hard slog. Amidst these scenes are shots of the eponymous planet slowly making its way to Earth. The final shot here is of Pieter Bruegel's 1565 painting The Hunters in the Snow which is consumed by fire.

Part I of the film is called "Justine" and chronicles her wedding reception. It begins with her and the groom, Michael, in the back of a stretch limousine that is unable to tack a sharp curve on a gravel road. This is an immediate link to the prelude and a recurring theme – impediments making it difficult, if not impossible, to move forward. They are able to laugh this off but things get much more serious when they finally arrive and are chastised by Claire who ushers them inside the mansion holding the program for the evening which was, no doubt, devised by a very expensive wedding planner.

This first part of the movie chronicles Justine's decent into despair and her mostly dysfunctional family. As the night wears on, it proves more and more difficult for her to keep a smile on her face. Justine escapes the reception several times which only serves to anger her family, especially brother-in-law John who reminds everyone that he spent a lot of money on it. Justine and Claire's parents verbally spar at dinner with their mother denouncing the institution of marriage. The father is rather indifferent to it all. As her depression worsens through the night, Justine looks to her parents for help but is turned away. Claire and Michael are sympathetic to her plight but don't know how to help. Sis is too preoccupied with trying to make sure John's money is well-spent while hubby can only offer an apple orchard as a gift to ward off the melancholia.

Dunst gives a great performance here. As someone who has been in Michael's shoes, Justine felt real to me. The sleeping, wanting to be alone one minute and then asking for help the next – it was all eerily familiar to me. (And yes, some depressed people really do wander off to go practice smiling alone before returning to crowds.) It was also very sad to see so many people not understand her predicament or even try to.

While Justine dealt with her melancholia, she is also the first to notice the planet of the same name. John, who knows something of the heavens, dismisses it by saying that it is simply the star Antares. Justine is oddly attracted to it - she even leaves the reception to take a stroll outside to view it – but the planet figures most prominently in the second half of the film.

Yet there is a scene worth noting from the first half. Justine has left the party and gone into a study that has these shelves with elastic bands stretching across the front that are meant to display open books. On the shelves are art book displaying more modern paintings and Claire replaces them with those showing older pieces. One of those is Bruegel's The Hunters in the Snow along with his The Land of Cockaigne and John Everett Millais' Ophelia, which features the subject lying in a stream on her back looking upwards. (Recall that she did not make it out of Hamlet alive.) Ophelia may have inspired one of the shots in the prelude but it is The Hunters in the Snow that is shown to us directly in it and which draws it to a close. Its muted colors surely provided a template for the look of the prelude and its disappointed, empty-handed hunters mirror Justine, if not most of her family.

The painting figures in Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris and this is echoed in part 2 when we are given shots of Melancholia as it draws nearer to the Earth.

Part II of the film is entitled "Claire". Sometime after the wedding, Claire, John, and their son, Leo, are living their lives in the mansion they call home. But Justine is not well and she takes a taxi out to join them. She has gotten worse. She won't eat nor bathe and sleep takes up most of her time. Since the wedding, the planet Melancholia has drawn ever closer to Earth and Claire is disturbed by the possibility that it will collide with the Earth. John tries to calm her fears but she feeds them by looking at the websites of doomsayers who claim that Melancholia will miss on its initial pass but will slingshot around in a "dance of death" and hit our blue ball.

Eventually Justine begins to emerge from her torpor. One night she wanders out and lies naked by the side of a river as she basks in the Melancholia's glow. On another day she and Claire take horses out for a ride. It is foggy outside and we see them ride down a long road in a rare aerial shot. Justine's steed, Abraham, refuses to cross a bridge no matter how she urges him on. (Again we have the notion of not being able to move forward.) Justine looks up and sees Melancholia hanging in the sky. This scene is notable for a couple reasons. First is that Wagner's music returns. Outside of the prelude, it has eschewed diagetic music until this point. The second reason is that, after this, Justine changes. She doesn't become happy but she sheds her sluggishness. At the dinner table she no longer looks like she is trying to retreat from world. She eats but looks on with a dispassionate curiosity with an anger bubbling underneath which comes to the surface on a second ride. The sisters are once again at the bridge and Abraham refuses to cross. Justine's anger is unleashed as she beats the horse mercilessly with her crop. It suffers the blows and then squats down defeated. (This is also a reflection of the prelude which shows the horse alone at night squatting down in extreme slow motion.) Eventually this anger morphs into a calm resignation. "The Earth is evil," she says. "We don't need to grieve for it. Nobody will miss it."

Without wanting to give away the ending I will defend von Trier's conceit of naming the new planet Melancholia. It is an apt metaphor. John tells us that no one noticed it before because it was hidden behind the sun just as people suffering from depression hide their sorrows behind forced smiles and fake sunny dispositions. The scenes with Melancholia looming in the sky are a wonderful visual metaphor for just how imposing and all-consuming a problem depression is (and recall Solaris as well). Claire is fearful of the planet and this perhaps mirrors her feelings towards Justine. At a couple points in the film when Justine can't put on her sunny face Claire cries out "Sometimes I hate you so much!" She fears her sister's inability to keep a happy face and thusly destroy her own plans for a neat, orderly bourgeois life.

Melancholia is a difficult film and that seeing it again may help me make more connections between the prologue and the rest of it. I would pay attention more closely to when we hear Wagner on the soundtrack. There are also unanswered questions such as why Leo calls Justine "Auntie Steelbreaker", why he wants to make caves with her, and what Justine means when she says "I know things." But I suspect there are no concrete explanations to be had.