Melancholia (2011)
Melancholia (2011)
A Film by Lars von Trier
1080p BluRay Rip | MKV | 1920 x 816 | x264 @ 10.5 Mbps | 129 mins | 11,26 Gb
Audio: English DTS 5.1 @ 1509 Kbps | Subtitles: None
Genre: Drama, Sci-Fi | 2 wins | Denmark, Sweden, France, Germany
A Film by Lars von Trier
1080p BluRay Rip | MKV | 1920 x 816 | x264 @ 10.5 Mbps | 129 mins | 11,26 Gb
Audio: English DTS 5.1 @ 1509 Kbps | Subtitles: None
Genre: Drama, Sci-Fi | 2 wins | Denmark, Sweden, France, Germany
Lars Von Trier's Melancholia, a meditation on depression and the end of the world, stars Kirsten Dunst as the emotionally troubled newlywed Justine whose sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) throws her a lavish wedding party. As her lack of emotional stability begins to take a toll on Justine's brand new marriage as well as the party – and old wounds are exposed – Claire's wealthy husband John (Kiefer Sutherland) knows a great deal about a planet that is on a possible collision course with Earth. The second half of the movie focuses on Claire, who ends up taking her sister in after the marriage collapses, and also begins to fear that John is hiding apocalyptically bad news. John Hurt and Charlotte Rampling co-star. Melancholia screened at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival.
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For a filmmaker often labelled a showman or ringmaster, Lars Von Trier has a peculiar approach to talking up his work. Ahead of this morning’s Competition premiere of Melancholia, which at times comes close to being a tragi-comic opera about the end of the world, he declared: “I may have made a film I don’t like.” Why? Because, he added, “This film is perilously close to the aesthetic of American mainstream films.” Really? Only in the happily perverse head of the director of Breaking The Waves and the 2000 Palme d’Or-winning Dancer In the Dark, could Melancholia be seen as safe or traditional. It takes a baffling, almost bone-headed premise, the stuff of schlocky genre movies, and from it creates a mesmerizing, visually gorgeous and often-moving alloy of family drama, philosophical meditation and anti-golfing tract.
Melancholia (2011)
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It begins, a la The Tree Of Life, with a succession of striking, sometimes cosmological images – extreme slow-motion of birds falling from the sky as Kirsten Dunst, wearing a bridal dress, gazes impassively at the camera; a horse tumbles to ground; a small planet drifts inexorably towards earth before crashing into it. Very soon this visual pageantry gives way to the handheld, intimate style that characterizes most of the film.
Dunst is Justine, an advertising copywriter who’s about to get married (to a sweet, but rather out-of-his depth chap played Alexander Skarsgard) at a remote and lavish castle. The wedding has been organized by her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and brother-in-law (Kiefer Sutherland), but quickly slides into a Festen-style nearest-and-dearest disaster: Justine’s parents (John Hurt, obsessed with women called Betty, and a deliciously citric Charlotte Rampling) don’t get on; her arrogant boss (Stellan Skarsgard) is trying to conduct business; she herself, when she’s not crying or holding up proceedings by taking leisurely baths, has sex with a stranger on the estate’s golf course.
Melancholia (2011)
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Justine suffers from depression, almost a pathetic fallacy seeing that a planet called Melancholia is heading for a collision course with Earth within days. The film, split into two sections, contrasts the two sisters: Justine, troubled, but with a darker vision of existence that seems not only to chime with Von Trier’s, but to better prepare her for the onrushing calamity than Claire’s more rational, almost bourgeois perspective.
Melancholia (2011)
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Astronomers will likely baulk at the scientific plausibility of the action. And there is, as always with Von Trier’s work, a degree of intellectual determinism that can be off-putting; he illustrates rather than truly explore ideas. It’s the actors, often taking on more challenging roles than those to which they’re accustomed, who bring the risk. All of them are excellent here, but Dunst is exceptional, so utterly convincing in the lead role – trouble, serene, a fierce savant – that it feels like a career breakthrough. She has a nude scene, but is spared the sadism the director often inflicts on his actresses. Meanwhile, Gainsbourg, for whom the end of the world must seem positively pastoral after the horrors she went through in Antichrist, locates in Claire a fragility that ensures she’s more than a whipping girl for social satire.
Melancholia (2011)
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The apocalypse, when it comes, is so beautifully rendered that the film cements the quality of fairy tale that its palatial setting suggests. Music, including a Wagnerian overture, is used to maximal, almost overwrought effect: Von Trier seems to be implying that it would be timid, cowardly even, to employ a less momentous score in the service of such fundamental consideration of the meaning of existence.
The cinematography (by Manuel Alberto Claro) is softer and less astringent than in recent Von Trier’s films. But that, together with a considerably less visceral assault on our sensibilities (though Justine does use her riding crop on a horse over-vigorously), in no way makes this one of the tamer entries in his remarkable filmography. Rather, it’s a bold and wholly powerful restatement of first principles.
Melancholia (2011)
No More Mirrors.