How does the world end?
When it is in the hands of the cinematic master of human misery, dark Danish auteur Lars von Trier, as it is in “Melancholia,” it ends in extraordinary, horrific, searing, aching and unthinkable ways.
It is his most hopeful film yet.
Still firmly rooted in the filmmaker’s esoteric, frustrating, provoking, demanding narrative style, the movie is also amazingly romantic — lush, ripe, rich, delicious. Its apocalyptic vision is encouraging in its hopelessness; its star, Kirsten Dunst, luminous in her anguish and devastation.
As the film begins, the just-married and still-in-wedding-white Justine (Dunst) is with her new husband Michael (Alexander Skarsgard) in the back of a limo. She is literally glowing. As they head to the estate where her older sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her husband, John (Kiefer Sutherland), are hosting the reception, the film is playful, funny, feathery light. But that lightness doesn’t linger.
As the reception unfolds in all the traditional ways, Justine begins to disappear, to slip inside the melancholia that she hoped the wedding, the marriage would keep at bay.
This is where you begin to see why Dunst is getting well-deserved raves for her performance. Witnessing her descent into the tortured grip of depression is as breathtaking as it is heartbreaking. Never has she been more emotionally exposed.
On that night, Justine spots a new star in the sky. It turns out to be a planet named Melancholia, many times the size of Earth and seemingly headed on a collision course for our world. And now von Trier is ready to get serious about the end of days.
As Claire tries to nurture Justine, the end of the world is turning into a real possibility and von Trier ponders how people cope. The most rational are the most at risk, of course.
The production itself is so sumptuous it’s sometimes easy to forget that this is von Trier. Director of photography Manuel Alberto Claro (“Reconstruction”) proves masterful moving between claustrophobic interiors and wide-open exteriors.
Somehow the notion of examining depression and the apocalypse has freed the filmmaker. In allowing himself to play, and I literally mean play, with the idea that the end is absolute, that life as we know it might disappear, he has found room to allow his characters to breathe in ways we have never seen in his work.
R. 2 hours, 15 minutes. At the Mayan.
