We hear the strains of the overture to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. The images that accompany the music are in slow motion. A bride runs through a forest, the tree roots gnarling and catching her train, as if they were reaching out to drag her into a freshly-dug earthly grave. A woman carries a child away from impending doom on a golf course, deep track marks behind her, indicating that the grass is melting away and threatening to swallow them both. A horse seems to stop in its tracks, slowly falling over, at an unseen obstacle. These are the images and main characters in Lars von Trier’s new film Melancholia, and the opening serves as an overture for the rest of the work.
The film is divided into two parts, named after the protagonists Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg). Part one is Justine’s wedding day, a sumptuous, extravagant event held at Claire’s family’s palatial home and golf course. The reception is a disaster. Their mother (Charlotte Rampling) vocally rails against the concept marriage in her unofficial mother of the bride speech. Numerous other guests find their own way to embarrass themselves. Justine seems distant from her otherwise attentive new husband (Alexander Skarsgard), and finds ways to steal herself away from the reception to take a bath and a nap. We soon find out that Justine is clinically depressed and is struggling to find ways to keep up her glad façade on what is supposed to be the happiest day of her life. Claire, for her part, is obsessively trying to keep things running to a schedule and ends up chiding Justine for prolonging the evening’s festivities, uttering “sometimes I just hate you so much!” more than once.
The second part finds Justine sinking deeper into her depression, and recovering at Claire’s home. In this half, we find out that a rogue planet named Melancholia, which had been hiding behind the sun, is on a rapid collision course with Earth. This is not a mass-hysterical film along the likes of Outbreak or Contagion. It is an isolated study in how a small group of people react to impending interplanetary doom. Claire’s logical but pompous husband John (Kiefer Sutherland) confidently claims that Claire’s obsession with this looming disaster is nonsense, for science tells us that no such collision will occur and life on the planet will continue. Eventually, we see Claire’s paranoia break apart her already-fragile psyche, while Justine seems to recover and grow stronger as the collision approaches.
Director von Trier has been open about his clinical depression, and reportedly came up with the idea for this film while in therapy. Depression is not always manifest in perpetual states of sadness, he (and medical science) posits, it is actually a numbing of the senses, an impenetrable guard against the ability to feel either joy or sadness. The film’s titular fictional planet, much like the classical disease, reflects the way that melancholia can happen upon a person. Sometimes, it can be explained by a lower release of endorphins in a human being. Sometimes, it is triggered by traumatic events. Whatever its impetus, von Trier seems to be saying, it comes upon even the most promising, up-and-coming people, for no rhyme, reason or meaning. You can attach a scientific explanation to it, but like the looming collision between the planets, it will travel at its own trajectory, without regard for human feeling or ideology.
