La Terra Trema

Lars von Trier's cinema of the apocalypse adds a vivid, exhilarating title to its list of films with Melancholia. Here is a film about two sisters who experience life and its disasters in different ways, and it's difficult at times to argue who's better equipped or prepared for not only the mundane, but also apocalyptic disaster. The film's opening sequence, a stunningly filmed series of enacted paintings-as-images, shows us exactly what to expect: a planet named Melancholia crashes into Earth and destroys it. In the film that follows, we see characters busying themselves with future-oriented events while we know that everyone will die. 

It is Justine's (Kirsten Dunst, Cannes-winner for Best Actress) wedding day. She's getting married to the kind-looking Michael (Alexander Skarsgard). Her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourgh) and her husband John (Kiefer Sutherland) have made their mansion available to the couple for their nuptials. Also attending are the sisters' estranged and destructive parents: father Dexter (John Hurt), who seems to have lost some of his mental clarity, and mother Gaby (Charlotte Rampling), who is a hardened beast. The most despicable character there, though, is surely Jack (Stellan Skarsgard), who is Justine's boss and does not let a single opportunity pass to mine her for work related information. For a moment, as we engage with these characters, the planet's destruction takes a back seat to a series of cosmically smaller but nonetheless significant events that occur as empty marriage rituals play out.

The film is divided in two parts, each associated with a sister and the privileging that particular perspective. While the first part focuses on Justine, the second follows Claire. Some time has passed between parts one and two, and there are clear differences in how the sisters act toward one another. It makes sense that Justine would be in the ad industry; she works in a world of fleeting significance and money-for-time-measured patriarchal significance. In De Sade's tale, the character Justine is a victimised female trying to make her way in a world that seems to thwart and threaten her at every turn regardless of her goodwill and good intentions. De Sade would later write another book, this time detailing the plight of Justine's sister Juliette. Discussing De Sade in conversation with von Trier falls beyond the scope of this review, but there's certainly something to be said about the Danish filmmaker's tale of two sisters that face not only a life that seems ill at home to inhabit, but the greater destruction of the entire world and its inhabitants. There is no divine judgment or cause for this destruction: it is simply a cosmological inevitability.

If Melancholia speaks to Sadean notions of pain, suffering and existence, there is something of the contemplative Tarkovsky in the film as well. The Russian master is well known for a couple of influential three-hour epics including the stark Stalker, but von Trier seems to invoke the resonance of the religious yet grounded potency of Andrei Rublev while consciously pointing us towards Tarkovsky's psychological masterwork, Solaris (later remade by Steven Soderbergh and starring George Clooney). In Solaris, a planet seems to engage with characters' consciousness to conjure up figures form their past, memory figments that look and feel real but are entirely the co-creations of the space station inhabitants (unwittingly) and the planet (deliberately), which seems to be a pulsing orb of consciousness. It is strongly suggested that the earth's destruction - a place Justine describes as full of evil - is brought on by her own depression. 

Yet there is another text that illuminates Melancholia in a different way: the first Dogme film, Thomas Vinterberg's devastating family drama Festen in which a birthday party at an exclusive lodge becomes a battleground between father and son as they stake their claims for the truth of the past. Melancholia moves between Dogme-like "realistic" shots to formalised, poetic imagery with ease, and like Festen has a (less overt) class dimension to it. 

And in all the destruction and psychological disintegration (and, for some, solidification), Melancholia is an exhilarating, positive film. Instead of anchoring the viewer to despair it shows the end of existence as first and foremost a psychological reality that is not without its positive points. Accompanied by a gorgeous soundtrack ("Tristan & Isolde") to complement its images and less invasive than Antichrist, Melancholia has greater resonance and is more spectacular than anything Roland Emmerich has ever done. No wonder it was completely ignored by the Academy Awards. 

(Special kudos to Kiefer Sutherland, who for the first time in more than a decade is not simply re-rendering Jack Bauer.)