Melancholia – review - The Guardian

Lars von Trier, that great maestro of facetious event cinema, is back with another instrument of torture. It's a disaster movie about an enormous blue planet called Melancholia – 20 times the size of Earth, but only half as big as the grain of salt you're going to need – which crashes into planet Earth. The film is entirely ridiculous, often quite boring, with a script showing worrying signs of being cobbled together. But even as a longtime Von Trier doubter, I now have to admit it grows on you; there's a mawkish fascination and some flashes of real visual brilliance, especially in the mysterious series of dream-tableaux that begin the film, which take something from both Millais's Ophelia and Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad.

I can never sit down to a new Von Trier movie without thinking of Czech Dream, a cheeky work from 2004, which was a factual record of two young Czech film-makers' anti-capitalist stunt. They took out ads for a non-existent new supermarket, and set up a phoney and completely flat storefront in the middle of an empty meadow. On the supposed "day of opening", thousands of bargain-hunters galloped across the field towards it and the directors filmed their reactions as these poor dupes realised there was nothing behind the piece of painted plywood.

Every time, millions of arthouse film-fans run frantically towards the latest new idea that Von Trier has set up. A movie about slavery, perhaps, or a movie about a girl getting hanged or one about people pretending to have cerebral palsy. And when we get up close, we find … well, what? For me, the contents are somehow less important than the windup, and I do really think Von Trier has something approaching a situationist genius for making the audience's discomfiture part of the show itself. In a way, the inevitable baffling let-down is an important final swoop in the Von Trier rollercoaster ride.

Melancholia is billed as a "beautiful film about the end of the world": both the description and the film itself are as intriguing and exasperating as anything he has ever done. In his Cannes press conference, in response to a question about German Romanticism and the use of Wagner in the film, twinkle-eyed Von Trier said he sympathised with Hitler, then retracted the remark and has now retracted the retraction: none of these comments are any more serious or unserious than the action of the film itself. The anarchic publicity is part of the effect.

Kirsten Dunst plays Justine, a troubled young woman who is getting married, and Charlotte Gainsbourg is her sister Claire, whose millionaire blowhard husband, played by Kiefer Sutherland, has paid for a grand and expensive wedding reception at a fancy country-house hotel. There is a nice cameo from Udo Kier as the queeny wedding planner. But Dunst's perfect day is marred by emotional tensions, not least between her estranged parents, formidably but all-too-briefly played by Charlotte Rampling and John Hurt, and these tensions catastrophically unlock Justine's own tendency towards depression or indeed melancholia. Perhaps the marriage was, in Shakespearian terms, "ill-starred", and they, like the rest of humanity, are affected by the gigantic planet supposedly on a course for imminent collision with Earth. It is Claire, supposedly the calm one, who succumbs to hyperventilating panic; for depressive Justine, the apocalypse is an ecstatic relief.

The entire wedding scene, effectively the film's second act, looks suspiciously like something Von Trier might well have sketched out ages ago, inspired by Thomas Vinterberg's Festen, and crammed in here to bulk out the film. The third act is the world's end itself: a woozy, dreamy, freaky event which is brilliant in its preposterous way, though it is odd that no one considers it necessary to turn on the TV news. The best of the film is the brief opening act: a weird, hallucinatory montage of moonlit or Melancholia-lit images, which are an exposition of themes and distorted premonition of narrative: they are an echo of some of the most disquieting images in Von Trier's Antichrist.

Dunst's performance has been much admired and was indeed a prizewinner at Cannes. Her descent into an almost zombie-like catatonic depression is forceful and very sincere, but it is impossible not to remember that the stunned, glassy-eyed look is something Von Trier has elicited from other leading ladies, including Björk and Nicole Kidman: a Meg-Ryan-on-Parky look. For my money, Gainsbourg gives a far more interesting performance.

Melancholia is an absurd film in many ways, and yet it would be obtuse not to acknowledge those lightning bolts of visual inspiration. When Justine goes out into the fields to look at the awesome blue planet, and then takes her clothes off to bathe in its light – that really is powerfully erotic and strange. In some ways, for all its silliness and self-consciousness, this is the happiest experience I've had with Von Trier for some time.