Melancholia

In rough chronological order, these are the things that fail in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia: hired livery, love, marriage, maternity, paternity, sex, career, sanity, animals, science, Jack Bauer, sisterhood, electricity, compassion, human will, oxygen, gravity, innocence and life. This isn’t really ruining any surprises; before the movie’s dramatic action begins, the world ends. In a stunningly photographed prologue, unforgettably set to the prelude from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, the Earth succumbs to a collision with an astronomical impossibility: a planet called Melancholia.

It used to be enough for stunted auteur Trier to destroy one woman per movie. Now he wants us all dead. For anyone who suffered through the punishing Antichrist or has tried to suppress brutal memories of Dogville or Breaking the Waves, total cosmic disintegration is practically Woody Allen territory. In fact, the first half of Melancholia spools out like a parody of Allen at his most privilege-fixated, with Justine (Kirsten Dunst) an increasingly remote prisoner of the elaborate wedding reception planned for her by sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg).

Claire’s spring-loaded husband (Kiefer Sutherland, his natural menace softened by some oddly mannered diction) reminds Claire, and anyone else who will listen, that he has spent vast sums on his sister-in-law’s big day. Twice he specifies that the golf course on this sprawling estate — where we, too, are prisoners for the planet’s last days — has a full 18 holes. And twice, Trier tips his hand by showing us the flag for a 19th hole. But whatever surrealism is at play in the director’s visuals and script is finally eclipsed by the planet, his metaphor for the depression that he has said crippled him a few years ago. As morbidly depressed Justine learns to stop worrying and embrace the vacuum of eternal nothing, Claire — standing in for those of us who still have a lot of reading and TV watching to do — checks out. Spying on Justine late one night, Claire sees her sister stretched out nude under the planet’s celestial glow. In that moment, the poles shift, luminous Justine calm at last as Claire’s ruination begins its descent.

Melancholia is spellbindingly beautiful, almost erotically sumptuous to look at and hear — the Wagner motif becomes a chorus, signaling Justine’s eroding mind, and later erupts into a full planetary requiem. It’s music as Trier has never used it before, Wagner channeling Schopenhauer’s call for humanity to renounce desire and Trier’s characters answering, “No can do.” Before a line of Trier’s typically stilted dialogue is heard, his love letter to despair illustrates the philosopher’s quandary: “What change will death produce in man’s existence and in his insight into the nature of things?” Suicide, Schopenhauer goes on, “is a clumsy experiment to make, for it involves the destruction of the very consciousness which puts the question and awaits its answer.” And so Trier answers, “Clumsiness and destruction? Done and done.” If his enunciation of clinical depression lacks depth, there’s a grim and bluntly funny satisfaction at its Chicken Little core: The sky really is falling. And that’s exactly how it feels.

So, yeah, Melancholia is still a Lars von Trier joint, which means Justine must ultimately spell out what we almost get away without hearing: Humans of Earth, you’ve earned the hellfire and the permanent black sure to follow, so shut up and deal. Still, Dunst and Gainsbourg — along with Sutherland and a wry John Hurt and a hissing Charlotte Rampling — transcend even the most head-slapping of Trier’s banalities (“You’ve been on the Internet again!”) with hypnotic wonder and dread.

See Melancholia — and see it in a theater, not at home — for the performances and for the Wagner and for Manuel Alberto Claro’s deep camerawork. But don’t mistake this for a more nuanced vision from Europe’s most frustrating director. Someone who rests his worn truncheon in your lap for two hours rather than kneecapping your eyeballs with it is still someone carrying a truncheon. Trier has destroyed one world so he may live to beat us again. See it with someone you love, but maybe someone you also sort of deplore.