MELANCHOLIA (2011) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Lars von Trier
Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Kiefer Sutherland,
Alexander Skarsgård, Charlotte Rampling, John Hurt,
Stellan Skarsgård, Udo Kier, Jesper Christensen
Lars von Trier brings about the end of the world and makes sure it goes out with a bang. He divides the story into two parts. The first, called "Justine", centers around a horribly posh wedding, at which the bride cracks up and the guests behave badly. The second, called "Claire", has the unbalanced bride (Kirsten Dunst) coming to stay with her responsible sister (Charlotte Gainsbourg) on the same golf-course estate where her botched wedding took place. And all the time, a planet called Melancholia is hurtling toward earth, for what's supposed to be a "fly-by," but could be something more serious than that. Once again, von Trier's primary subject is hysteria. Specifically, how much can he make his female characters suffer, and how crazy will they get? Both Dunst and Gainsbourg throw themselves into that, but under von Trier's detached direction the characters seem less like people than the subjects in some cosmic psych-lab experiment, where the scientist (von Trier) sets up a problem and plunks them down in it, to see how they respond. It doesn't all add up, but since Kubrick's no longer around to take on stuff like this, why not von Trier? It's an awfully good-looking psych-lab experiment.
