#43 - My Movies - Melancholia

I saw Melancholia this week. Let me tell you it’s a strange but very interesting movie.

I’m not familiar with the director. A Danish guy, Lars von Trier, who apparently likes to stir in some controversy around his films and himself. I read that the idea for this movie came after he had a depressive episode and found that, depressed and indifferent, he actually was stronger and able to withstand more of the hard things in life.

So the movie starts with the end of the world due to some planetary catastrophe. Then the story centers on two sisters, Justine and Claire played by Kirsten Dunst (this part was initially planned for Penelope Cruz) and Charlotte Gainsbourg. We attend the wedding of Justine and Michael, a big event planned by Claire and financed by her wealthy husband John (Kiefer Sutherland). Claire wants to give her sister the perfect wedding, but soon we realize that it cannot be. Justine is actually pretty strange and ill. To start off, the bride and groom arrive to the reception two hours late. When we meet the girls’ parents we can explain to some degree the total dysfunctionality of this family: anger, resentment and unresolved conflict bubble to the surface of this family’s dynamic.

The wedding ends with a bride so disengaged from and indifferent to her wedding that she wanders off to the beautiful palatial gardens to urinate on the grass and in her wedding gown and to have sex with a stranger. The heartbroken groom finally leaves with his family.

This wedding seems a bit odd to me. Justine’s family, self-cenetered and all, is obviously aware of her mental illness, that to impose a wedding on such a frail individual seems clearly ill-advised and counterintuitive.

I guess because the story in reality deals with the impending end of the world and humanity’s tendency to not believe that our end can be almost uninmportant and meaningless. I understood how sick Justine really is, because as she says herself she “knows things,” and she knows that the planet Melancholia won’t pass by the Earth but that there will be a head-on collision with us and that we will end with it. And still, she remains in total silence and indolence, not ever once showing fear or despair, when you would think that any other human being would do something, at least share it with her loved ones, no matter how useless she knows it all is. But Justine’s listlessness is extreme and her disregard of all things human is really serious.

The acting by Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg I thought was powerful and Wagner’s music is heartbreaking to the point that even your bones vibrate, especially at the end.