By Matthew D'Abate

It is difficult when dealing with such a provocateur and pioneer as Lars Von Trier to separate the director's personality from his work. The critic attempts, often unsuccessfully, to ignore the enfant terrible persona Von Trier has cultivated over his 25 years of award winning filmmaking in relationship to his films, and this fact remains true with his latest creation, the lyrical Melancholia. In the hands of any other filmmaker, Melancholia would have been a laughably apocalyptic and masturbatory narrative careening towards a Michael Bay-style denouement. 

The story line is a blunt instrument: 

The Earth collides with another planet and it is the end of everything. 

Perhaps if Von Trier filmed Melancholia 14 years ago, somewhere between The Idiots and Breaking the Waves, when his artistic grudge against anything mainstream was at its height, it would have been filled with such artistic pomp it would have been unbearable to watch.

However, Melancholia is one of Von Trier's most mature and tempered films, astoundingly written, and a departure from his last creation about a phantasmagoric battle between the sexes, the hellish Antichrist. 

Melancholia opens with an amazing prelude, a purely separate fugue from the narrative line of the film, and then splits into two parts named for each of the protagonist sisters: ennui-filled, gorgeous Justine, and the frail and brooding Claire. We are shown images from space of the Earth colliding with this telluric, newly discovered planet, choicely named Melancholia. Rich, bold string sections from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde surge as the images, eerily akin to Terence Malick's recent secular, god-hungry picture The Tree Of Life, depicts Earth doomed to an elegant apocalypse, with birds falling from the sky and people scurrying in fear.   

Justine is Von Trier's coded personae; irrationally saddened and compelled to 'fits' of hysteria, made clear by the obvious dysfunctional family who've all gathered to celebrate her wedding to the young, doting Michael. The wedding is held on the opulent estate of Claire and her 'filthy' rich husband John, played with quiet gluttony by Keifer Sutherland, who is continually peeved by Justine's spells of depression. It is here, in Part One, Melancholia becomes a 19^th Century novel, a true milieu in which the characters each expose their weaknesses. 

Charlotte Rampling's turn as the old nihilist crank mother who doesn't care for such pageantries of love is dreadfully spot-on, and John Hurt as Justine's drunk and self-admitted fool of a father couldn't be more natural. 

Von Trier is a master at displaying the idiocy, inanity and the pure nihilistic undercurrent of human existence. All of Justine's family and other friends somehow undercut her strength that it becomes no wonder, later in the film, that she is reduced to a bag of skin who can't even bath herself. Here is where Kristen Dunst shines, aptly noted by her Cannes nod for Best Actress. This sort of vulnerability, Dunst's only truly expressed role since The Virgin Suicides, elevates Justine's depression into an understandable option out of a broken and poisoned world. 

"Everything on this Earth is evil," Justine tells us, "and no one will miss it," her placid grey-blue eyes welling with existential emptiness. 

Part Two's focus is on Claire, with Charlotte Gainsbourg playing the pouting and vaguely happy sister, confronting the fact that Melancholia, the 'double-planet', is careening towards Earth. Her husband happens to be an astronomy buff and swears the planet will just pass us. We know, from the fiendishly detailed prelude, exactly what comes next. Part Two drags upon hour two, and is unfortunately the weaker part of this otherwise well-executed tale of despair.

At the close of the picture, one of my delights was watching the expressions of those that followed me out of the theater. The sheer thematic hopelessness might be heavier than most in the popcorn 3D crowd might be up for, but if unapologetic displays of brutal human truths are your thing, then Melancholia is your bet.           

 

Melancholia is playing at the Angelika Film Center on Houston St.