Melancholia

When one of the film's protagonists proclaims, "The earth is evil. No one will grieve for it," you know you're in for rocky seas. In fact, the first eight minutes of Lars von Trier's film is a visually ravishing series of apocalyptic postcards. Dead birds fall from the sky like black snow, a mother clings to her child as her feet sink into the melting lawn of a golf course, a bride is snared by ominous vines in a shadowy forest. These unsettling and exquisitely composed images — metaphorical tableaus for the crippling depression that plagues the filmmaker — are set to the mournful prelude of Richard Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde," whose final crescendo provides a soundtrack for the immense planet Melancholia, as it smashes into the earth, shattering our existence into thousands of lifeless pieces. 

The destruction of all life has never been rendered with more operatic beauty or cruel finality.

What follows is a more terrestrial examination of depression, centered around a pair of sisters. Divided into two reflective halves, von Trier's movie first follows Justine (Kirsten Dunst), a bright young advertising copy editor, who, with her new husband (Alexander Skarsgård), has arrived late to her wedding reception held on the incredible country estate of her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and husband John (Kiefer Sutherland). Shooting on handheld digital video, von Trier returns to his Dogme-95 style for the black-humored celebration, an affair dominated by dysfunctional parents (Jon Hurt, Charlotte Rampling), a despotic boss (Stellan Skarsgård) and Udo Kier camping it up as a prima donna wedding planner. Making matters worse, Justine is a self-destructive manic-depressive who keeps disappearing from her reception to take a bath, screw a guest, and obsess over the strange star that's appeared in the night sky.

This section of the film is the liveliest von Trier has been in years. Extracting black humor and mercurial sadness in equal doses, the family dramas and confrontations are handled with deft assurance. Dunst expertly constructs the cheery facade that Justine must present — even as her psyche is scarred by unrelenting despondence. There is little doubt that the cherubic actress has become the conduit through which von Trier has chosen to express his own emotional madness. Using a microscope rather than a telescope, he makes that darkness an absurdly intimate experience. But his characters, even Justine, are thinly developed types that convince with their attitudes and emotions but never express their souls. In the end, they are merely ants, ready to be scorched into von Trier's thematic cinders. 

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