Melan­cho­lia

If film­mak­ing is ther­a­py for Lars von Tri­er, you have to wor­ry just how well his self-pub­li­cised bat­tle with depres­sion is going. A cou­ple of months after Ter­rence Malick’s The Tree of Life showed us the begin­ning of the uni­verse, von Trier’s omi­nous­ly named Melan­cho­lia gives us the end of the world. It’s a dis­as­ter movie. It’s a dou­ble-dis­as­ter movie, in fact. It’s Dan­ish dogme clas­sic Fes­ten col­lid­ing with Hol­ly­wood mete­or-melo­dra­ma Deep Impact.

Just as he did with hor­ror-shock­er Antichrist, von Tri­er opens with a gor­geous slo-mo pre­lude. A hyp­not­i­cal­ly beau­ti­ful image of Kirsten Dunst’s face fills the screen, fol­lowed by a mon­tage of strange, strik­ing images. A golf course show­ing Hole 19. A dis­tant galaxy. A horse stum­bling. Dun­st float­ing in water.

Then it begins for real, with a love­ly, wit­ty scene that proves to be bet­ter than much of what fol­lows: a new­ly mar­ried cou­ple played by Dun­st and True Blood’s Alexan­der Skars­gård strug­gle to reverse their car up a path. But if Melan­cho­lia promis­es to fluc­tu­ate deft­ly between the cos­mic and the inti­mate, it actu­al­ly proves to be as blunt as its two-hand­ed structure.

Part I (‘Jus­tine’) reveals Dun­st to be a crush­ing­ly depressed woman whose lav­ish wed­ding rapid­ly peels apart along with her psy­che. Part II (‘Claire’) sees her straight-laced sis­ter Char­lotte Gains­bourg and her sci­en­tist hus­band Kiefer Suther­land dis­cov­er that the mys­te­ri­ous plan­et Melan­cho­lia is on an apoc­a­lyp­tic crash-course with Earth.

As the giant plan­et brings death from above, loom­ing larg­er and larg­er in the sky with mag­net­ic metaphor­i­cal force, Gains­bourg shat­ters into a pan­ic while Dun­st accepts their fate with unnerv­ing Zen.

Float­ing on tides of grandiose Wag­ner­ian music, von Trier’s cos­mic spec­ta­cle is anoth­er fas­ci­nat­ing dose of metaphor and ther­a­py for his own much-talked-about and often-doubt­ed pri­vate trou­bles. But the spurt­ing blood, talk­ing fox­es and body hor­ror of Antichrist have now been replaced with a strange calm that threat­ens to teeter into boredom.

Like­wise, Dunst’s per­for­mance – which won her a Best Actress award at Cannes, despite being writ­ten for Pené­lope Cruz – is too insu­lar to ful­ly engage the audience’s empa­thy. No ques­tion, Melan­cho­lia is incred­i­bly eerie, and is lent an excit­ing fris­son by the authen­tic­i­ty of an actress and film­mak­er with first-hand expe­ri­ences of psy­cho­log­i­cal trauma.

Every­thing, though, feels too far out of reach. Only Manuel Alber­to Claro’s beau­ti­ful, dreamy cin­e­matog­ra­phy con­jures up any sense of rap­ture. Is the entire plan­et head­ing towards blank obliv­ion? Or is it just inside von Trier’s head. We’re not too sure which would be worse.