The English word melancholy and its cognates in other
European languages comes from the Greek for “black bile,” one of
the four humors of Galenic medicine whose predominance in an
individual was thought, up until about 150 years ago, to determine
his or her personality type. The melancholy man — thoughtful,
reclusive, tending to a gloomy outlook on things — was a
recognized dramatic character and often, as in the case of Jacques
in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, rather a figure of fun to
more extroverted, high-spirited types. To this day, we recognize
the latent absurdity in projecting onto the world the merely
private state of mind which produces the melancholy type. It’s a
form of self-pity and self-importance that is always unattractive
and often ridiculous, even to those who might otherwise be in
sympathy with the sufferer. When Skeeter Davis sang of “The End of
the World,” she could only have been appealing to teenagers who had
not yet learned the self-mastery and self-detachment that comes
with maturity.
The movie business has long found that same teen audience
too profitable to want to push it beyond its natural if absurd
self-absorption. In Girl,
Interrupted poor
Brittany Murphy, who later came to a sad end herself, played a
character who hanged herself to the strains of Miss Davis’s
lugubrious ballad as if the filmmakers were utterly deaf to its
irony. Lars von Trier’s Melancholia goes upmarket with the
music, using endless repetitions of Wagner’s Prelude and
Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, but with the
same purpose and very much the same result. What is sublime in the
opera becomes ridiculous in the movie not only through quotation
and repetition, not only through a reduction of the former’s heroic
scale to the level of family soap opera, but because Mr. von Trier,
as melancholy a man as Jacques himself, is able to put no distance
between himself and his depressed heroine Justine (Kirsten Dunst).
The latter’s adoption of Skeeter Davis’s attitude to disappointment
is Mr. von Trier’s own — or least he affected to make it his own
before an audience in Berlin recently when he
said: “I hope a catastrophe is coming
because everything is getting a little dull.”
He, like Justine, has suffered from depression, which adds
to the symbolic import of the fact that Melancholia also happens to
be the name of the planet, supposedly hidden by the sun until the
action of the film begins, on an apparent collision course with the
earth. What do you suppose are the odds of that? The planet’s fiery
destruction thus becomes a synecdoche for the heroine’s
unhappiness, and it is difficult — deliberately difficult, I would
say — to separate the fabricated events of the film which threaten
a literal End of the World from the feelings of the fabricator.
Justine obviously speaks for her auteur when she says that
“the earth is evil; we don’t need to grieve for it. Nobody will
miss it.” And, in case we didn’t get the point, “All I know is life
on earth is evil. I know we’re alone.” The best you can say about
such posturing is that it mistakes a private feeling for an
objective statement of fact. And it is the director as much as his
character who is doing the posturing.
But Mr. von Trier takes his time bringing us to the
apocalypse (or, possibly, not-apocalypse) of the movie’s
conclusion. The first hour or so of his more than two-hour picture
hardly mentions the fate in store for the world and instead
concentrates on Justine’s wedding reception at which she and the
groom, Michael (Alexander Skarsgaard), arrive two hours late after
their limo gets stuck — much to the fury of her sister Claire
(Charlotte Gainsbourg) and Claire’s husband John, who owns the golf
resort where the reception is to be held. But Justine and Michael
just laugh about it, and Justine insists on visiting her horse,
Abraham, in the stables before even more belatedly joining her
guests. These include an unusual number of people — especially
Justine’s mother (Charlotte Rampling), father (John Hurt) and
employer (Stellan Skarsgaard) — who are willing to court public
embarrassment in the cause of lively cinema. John is also by way of
being that stock figure in von Trier films, the bullying imposter
of a husband who victimizes his wife under the guise of loving and
protecting her.
There is some value to be had, perhaps, out of the comedy
of embarrassment in this part of the film, but it really has
nothing to do with what happens in Part II, the End of the World
segment. Like nearly all cinematic apocalypses, this is really a
thinly disguised political statement, which in Mr. von Trier’s case
means, I guess, the kind of madcap nihilism that got him banned
from the Cannes Film Festival last year for confessing to Nazi
sympathies. I think this confession was no more to be taken
seriously than his declaration in the film that “life on earth is
evil” or that he would welcome a catastrophe to relieve the
boredom. He just likes being a provocateur, as he showed at the
Berlin appearance (admission charge, 12 Euros) when he crowed: “The
Palm [d’Or] is given out every year; I don’t remember the last time
they gave out the Persona Non Grata.” It tells you all you need to
know about him, and his films, that the audience cheered this, as
it did some of his routine anti-Americanism on the same occasion.
Those cheers, or their equivalent, are also what he is going for in
Melancholia, and he knows how to get them. It’s not by
making good movies.
