MIFF Day Fifteen

by Rebecca Butterworth 09 August 2011 03:47 Filmink Festival Coverage

Brilliant, dark and emotionally stirring, Lars Von Trier's film about the end of the world was a fittingly otherworldly cinema experience.

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It's not often that I need time to process a film. Usually, my incessant mind-critic doesn't even have to wait until the movie is over before it has given me a list of the pros and cons, the downfalls, the most captivating moments - it makes it hard to just enjoy. Tonight, I had some idea that it would be different - I hadn't seen a film by Lars Von Trier (Dogville, Antichrist, Breaking The Waves, Dancer In The Dark, Zentropa). The notion of gratuitous sex and misogyny is rarely appealing to me, and because I think sex should be intimate, safe and private, it meant that I wasn't willing to patronise the man who led to porn being legalised in an entire country. But judgments you make without experience are only rarely acceptable, and so I was with a friend when I saw Melancholia. The end of the world? That, I can handle.

How to begin? It might have been the anticipation that made my skin feel cold in the opening sequences, the experience of which had more in common with being in an art gallery in which long-forgotten Dali paintings were coming to life, to music sinister enough to make your ears bleed, than being in a cinema. It's full throttle, dark, unavoidable emotion from the word go. And truthfully, from the first moment until the moment the credits rolled, I was not aware that the cinema was where I was.

To explain the plot seems like doing the film an injustice, but nevertheless. Justine (Kirsten Dunst) comes home to her brother-in-law John's (Kiefer Sutherland) estate, where her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) has organised a glamorous wedding. Set in two parts, each from the perspective of one of the sisters, Melancholia is the story of the family's waiting for the coming of the planet of the same name, which is supposed to pass the earth by in three days' time.

To know more about the story is not really necessary, because it is more about the way it is told than what happens. There is not one performance in the piece that is not excellent. Dunst is first-class, more nymph than actress, and plays depression like she's been there before, and is perhaps still there. Gainsbourg's Claire provides the antidote to her sister's lilting grasp on sanity, and does the best resigned terror you're ever likely to see. Sutherland's John is a barometer for the tone of the film, along with a wonderfully brusque performance by Charlotte Rampling - who plays the girls' bitter-cold mother - who is responsible for the humour that breaks the tension. Appearances by John Hurt and Stellan Skarsgård are exacting and dead-on. The film is a visual piece of art. Von Trier uses lack of score as well as he does music, both placed perfectly.

Melancholia is thematically broad, stretching itself over ideas such as love, reality, and the value of life itself. It is hard to imagine a more perfectly pitched screenplay, written by Von Trier, as it both hints at the things that lie beneath people, and hits you over the head with them at the same time; its beauty is oblique and frugal.

I just can't say anything else without sounding like I'm leaking superlatives. Melancholia has gone straight to my top five - with a bullet, a tonne of plastic explosives, and an H-bomb. Has Von Trier attempted to redeem himself after copping so much flack for Antichrist (which I am still not seeing)? I seriously doubt it crossed his mind. Nevertheless, to my mind, he's probably done that.