Copyright © 2012 by James Clark
In the stream of dead ends that is Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011), one moment stands out as most violently sustaining a rich man’s dagger tossed toward his wife, “Is everybody in your family mad?” That outspoken fellow having been found by her to have committed suicide with a bottle full of sleeping pills she had bought to administer to herself in the event that an astronomical singularity coming their way might not be as tame as predicted, she turns to her sister, Justine—whom she had installed as a permanent house guest due to the latter’s having become squashed to the point of virtual immobility on losing all will to live, but who had begun something of a recovery—and quietly proposes that they face the squashing of planet earth, by a larger planet gone far astray, by mustering affective graces whose true roots had never been functional. “I want us to be together when it happens… Help me. Justine. I want it to be nice… We could have a glass of wine…” Justine, who had regarded the cosmic developments with gentle awe and depth of body language far outpacing that of her more or less desperately insistent hosts, regards her sister, Claire, with hate in her eyes and a combatively rigid jaw. “Do you want to hear what I think of your plan? I think it’s a piece of shit! You want it to be nice? Why don’t we do it in the fuckin’ toilet?”
Now during the lengthy and painful migration to that spot, Justine had been far from a generous avatar of the precept, “the show must go on”—she had, in fact, produced a de facto divorce during her wedding reception—but none of her lurid “scenes” hitherto (as Claire, convening and directing her wedding show, had warned her against, on that of all days) ever reached such witless and vicious self-promotion. Though the heavenly body bearing down on a planet of remarkably hemorrhaging bathos had been given the name “Melancholia,” it is the melancholy of all of world historical motion that suffuses this film, and Justine’s crowning, self-defeating cruelty toward Claire could be seen as a frenzy of self-hate in face of a shocking instance of finitude. That may, however, be a misleading tangent, insofar as all the production energies here point away from making much of such personal status reports. (At the dying moments of the celebrity wedding in its fulsome debacle, the butler reminds Claire of the unfinished business of announcing a winner in the contest to guess the number of beans in a bottle. “That’s completely trivial,” is her coverage of the anti-climax as she sidles by.)
A bit before the scatological outburst, Justine delivered a more measured (though somewhat overreaching) blast, one that carries a more rounded alarm. “There’s only life on Earth, and not for long. Nobody will miss it. Life on earth is evil… When I say we’re alone, we’re alone…” There is a world of difference between the glib and dubious premium on punching out her sister, and the painful survey of an absence of that magic which alone provides sufficient cogency. Her punctuating that latter dirge with the phrase, “I know things” (although it includes the daffy claim to have correctly guessed the number of beans), may be, in the last analysis, just what we need to come to a solid vantage point from which to strike the right note in appreciating from its beginning the play of hugely corruptible phenomenal energies informing this harrowing and strangely beautiful film. In fact there were historically telegraphic clues long before this climactic finale, giving us an almost-too-good-to-be-true thrill. But, in their circumstantial bearing they would be less apt for launching an exposition such as this. Having begun to put into play the sensual bedrock of this narrative, we had best hold it in abeyance until making available the work’s vast infrastructure of dramatic circuitry offering a rich and varied array of dilemmas strongly and comprehensibly pertaining to the disclosures of Melancholia.
Through a series of fits and starts, Justine circumvents imprisonment in marriage to a suitor wrong for her. Though she has gone through the motions of actually marrying him, it is the action of ditching him that we are put in touch with (the wedding never being shown). As noted, Claire was prominently involved in facilitating her problematic relative’s becoming a normal member of society. After the dissolution of the insufferable bond, it was Claire’s woodsy haven (a veritable chateau) to which Justine raced in despair about her world’s collapsing into unspeakable ugliness. This edgy interplay approximates an ancient story compelling to a long-ago, Surrealist film about cosmic rightness, never significantly distributed outside of France, namely, Jacques Demy’s Peau d’Ane (Donkey Skin) (1970).
One of the circumstantial aspects of Melancholia and von Trier’s wider output is the dredging up of surviving players having once worked with Demy. In Dancer in the Dark, we have the doyenne of Demy stars, Catherine Deneuve, gracing a musical scenario bubbling over with initiatives from The Young Girls of Rochefort. In Melancholia we have John Hurt, in the role of Justine’s father. Long ago (in 1972, to be exact) he played the part of a chillingly venomous groom within the Plague-ridden precincts of The Pied Piper. Though for von Trier he emanates a benign, aged cosmopolitan and buffoon (his character in Pied Piper being a sickly pretender to military glory who goes off to war in England and has to be ransomed from captivity by his wealthy father), with shocks of hippie hair (Donovan was a co-star, and his chastity-belt confined bride was a spacey teen, a touch followed up by von Trier, in having Justine’s long-divorced mother in tie-dye top and love beads, and proclaiming to all the guests, “I wasn’t at the church. I myself hate marriages, especially pertaining to my family. I don’t believe in it”) and the certainty he was charming to young girls (at the reception he carries on a non-stop flirtation with two Fraulein, both named Betty), he’s a person of urgent interest to Justine (“Please, Dad, I really have to talk to you”). With various other kingly figures on hand—her gentleman-farmer groom; her self-styled tower of power and bully boss at the ad agency where she worked until informing him during the reception (where he thought to make a splash by, in his Best Man’s toast to the bride, publicly promoting her from copy writer to art director) that he was “a cheap, small, power-hungry little man;” Claire’s husband, who paid the piper for this wedding through his nose, frequently reminding Justine (and causing her eyes to freeze over) that he’s a billionaire and has blown on that night more than most people could dream of spending (“Who else do you know of with an eighteen-hole golf course on his property?”); and (tiny) Tim, tasked by the boss to get a “tag line” from her for a magazine shot of three semi-nude women arranged in a circle on the floor, whom she pushes over and fucks in a sand trap on one of her bailouts from the party—he’s the one she urges to stay overnight in one of the many guest rooms and have breakfast with her next morning. Justine, thereby, demonstrates the dividedness of Donkey Skin’s Princess, whose widowed and (by her) beloved father wants her for his new bride and whom she puts off with various lavish wedding dress ideas (including a moonlight dress and, finally, a dress made from the skin of the donkey whose bowel movements of jewels and gold coins constitute the gross national product of the kingdom) posed to her by her fairy godmother, the Lilac Fairy. On the night of the reception, Claire is dressed in a lilac gown. As her dread about the rogue planet begins to shatter her poise, she uses a device her young son has crafted, a wire circle on a stick, to size up whether the predicted fly-by is still on. The Lilac Fairy whips up with her magic wand dresses for herself to suit her mood, and goes on to present a wand to the Princess to cushion her exile in that donkey skin. The actress playing the blithe and witty advisor, Delphine Seyrig (a star from Last Year at Marienbad, the grand, hyper-sculpted and dazzlingly lit garden of which links to the posh links of Claire’s husband), delicately handsome but rather gaunt, is reprised by delicately handsome and rather gaunt, Charlotte Gainsbourg, playing Claire. Delphine Syrig’s co-star in Marienbad, Sacha Pitoeff, plays the King’s right-hand man in Donkey Skin, assuring him from a window overlooking the Princess in the courtyard (singing an elegy to love—“Amour, amour, je t’aime pas”) that the incestuous wedding is the right stuff. Just before he leaves the party and his wife-for-an-evening (without a night time and consummation), the groom (Alexander Skarsgard, gaunt and darkly tense, like Sacha Pitoeff) looks down at Justine, bathed in creamy light and looking like a sombre whipped cream desert, drifting outward from the courtyard to a vantage point from which to observe the celestial intruder becoming more fascinating as the dreadful night lurches to a close. As she plunges across the velvet fairway we see her from behind, from the high perspective of the groom—wouldn’t you know he’d be called Michael!—and her haute couture, snow-white, billowing wedding gown—a bit the worse for wear on her having caught it on the works of the golf cart she used for one escape move, and on her having torn it off to have a hopefully soothing bath and stare into space on another escape mission—reminds us of the bulky donkey pelt the Princess wears (often moving along in it in slow motion, the speed we behold in Justine, for a few seconds at the film’s enigmatic first scene, her white gown tracing behind her, as she treads with difficulty, having many virulent plant roots [that might also be film roots] entwined around her ankles) and her cantering in dishabille through the forest she counts on as a refuge.
During the departure with his mother, Michael, as numb as someone coming out of major surgery, kisses Justine’s forehead and says, “This could have been a lot different.” She, looking barely less comatose, replies, “Yes, Michael, it could have been different.” And with the saga of the Beast/King (played by Cocteau’s Bête, Jean Marais) and the beautiful, yet beastly, Princess who eventually accepts the proposal of a Tim-like Prince (Tim, in fact, does propose during the Gettysburg-range of manoeuvres here, citing “good sex” and business smarts; but she demurs [“I don’t think that’s a good idea…]), we have at hand an alternative to Justine’s administration of justice as far as she can see it. Demy’s film settles for a version of the Cocteau denouement of absurd comfort, which Justine would be sure to cover with, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” (She couldn’t get excited about Michael’s news that he’d bought an apple orchard where they could raise a family, because the banality of his every move offered not a shred of the truly “different.” The apple-pie guy only exacerbates her troubled movement toward a compass-star that couldn’t be more unusual.) Like Cocteau and Justine, Demy was beset with the elusiveness of true love, the Surrealist “more” (than normality). The Princess never comes close again to the radiance generated during her baking (in the glow of her memory of her mother), for an ailing (as yet unseen) Prince, a “Cake d’Amour” (“Love-Cake”). The two presences, mother and daughter, sing, as they work, a spritely ode to a vein of joy tangible amidst appalling odds. It seems to me that von Trier cherishes Demy’s discernment as he takes up a very tough stretch of reflection rendered cinematically.
But that is not the end of his vigorous consultation with respect to the history of cinema, the history of art and the history of thought. The sizzle of Melancholia gives access to another very distinguished precedent on behalf of doing justice to the murderous ways of primal dynamics. This factor is omnipresent in the magisterial instalment of a life-sentence to hard labor strangely weighing upon a cast of characters situated in a palace, and with memorable mobility. Its specific source first comes to us by way of the opening sequence, revealing the countless glittering stars in the night sky, a vision that sidles up to the opening shot of countless shimmering grains of sand, in Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes (1964). Although restricted range of motion is the cardinal crisis of the earlier film, and Justine operates a veritable revolving door in and out of her entrapment at the wedding reception with those she can’t stand for any protracted time-frame, her meandering amidst the dunes of the bunkers, with the sea glistening just beyond, traces a kind of fruitless bid for liberty and thereby it is hard-wired for progress-checks vis-a-vis the simplistic scrambling of the geek whose bottled bugs return to us twice—in the “trivial” bottle of beans and in the bugs seething out of the earth as the biology-disrupting mass moves in for the kill. In addition to that, the zone from which the death-star emerged was the constellation Scorpio, and scorpions were very much a part of the unbeknown death march amidst the dunes. (Claire’s amateur astronomer (going for stars rather than insects) and scientistic jet set bore of a husband [John] also evokes the Man fromTokyo.) On coming to Claire’s for convalescence, Justine is led to the bathtub by her concerned hostess, and in the striving to make the warm water work for her we brush against the washing, wiping, rubbing and caressing of the precedent. While the woman not precisely doing calendar art at her dunes comes to vibrant physical animation in being caressed by and caressing the visitor, Justine emits listless and fearful responses when led by Claire, our fairy godmother, to a nice Italian-design bathtub. Her face and body look positively ancient, even her formerly impressive muscle tone is captured by the camera to look invalid-dumpy. She slumps on the floor and screams in fear. Claire, sounding ever-so-much the optimist Lilac Fairy, soothes her with, “This was a good practice for tomorrow’s bath.” Urged to eat, Justine is treated to meatloaf, her favorite dish, and she finds it “tastes like ashes,” recalling the sand-compromised meals at the pseudo-brickworks. Finally, perhaps not simply just for fun, but definitely as much comic relief as this stringent scenario affords, we have the testy celebrity event artiste-overseer, who hisses to Claire as Justine and her vaguely beloved arrive two hours late to the function—“I’m at the end of my rope!” (a situation that has the bug-guy hopping mad, much to the amusement of his collector-captors).
More tenuous but no less thematically pregnant facsimiles hover about the in fact arrestingly visceral collisions occasioned by Justine’s nose for smelling rats where others notice only sweet comforts. In a provocative unity with the dithering Princess bride-to-be in Donkey Skin, Justine’s ruthlessly fault-finding juggernaut fails her when it comes to her father. After deflatedly seeing off Michael and distantly (shot from quite a distance across the fairway) lubricating Tim, she’s back at the party dancing with dear old Dad, to “Strangers in the Night.” He would, in his note finking out on her plea to stay the night (“…got a ride offer I couldn’t refuse” [perhaps from the team of Betties he’d spent much of the night fondling]), refer to her as Betty. John Hurt’s previous wedding reception could be termed unforgettable by virtue of its moment of cutting the cake, only to be beaten to the punch by its collapsing due to having been invaded by greedy and poisonous rats. Justine certainly requires several bouts of air by way of—among more cosmic matters—cumulatively felt to be malodorous emanations from the crowd; but her snuggling up to a figure with nothing more in evidence than a sugary voice and an alcoholic grin (there are also lumps on his cheek resembling Plague symptoms), has to temper our take on her as daring to be different. In the orbit of Hurt’s, Franz of Hamelin, there is the bride’s club-footed boyfriend, steamrollered by Franz along with his loving mentor, an alchemist, who, in the course of being railroaded to the stake, takes us over to a figure from the work of Demy’s friend, Robert Bresson, namely, Balthazar at Risk (1966), and its donkey whose grace and sense and touching death put him at risk from rats. Despite being insultingly late to the party, Justine insists on checking in with “Abraham,” the horse at Claire’s stables of which she has become the de facto owner and who, she claims (though disputed by the actual owner and pervasive man in charge), “only lets me ride him.” She softly coos to Abraham, “Michael is my husband now…” implying some kind of rare and wonderful love for the beast. In this she coincides with Bresson’s Marie, who as a young girl loved and cared for Balthazar and was loved by him in return, but later neglected him. Justine beats him fiercely on two subsequent occasions, for refusing to cross a tiny bridge in his sensing her lack of love as coinciding with the horrific malignancy. Her boss, Jack (the ass), at the public relations firm, brings to us a form of Marie’s thuggish boyfriend, Gerard, who abuses Balthazar for balking at cooperating with his plans, displaying a bleak cruelty all the more staggering for his fronting a smuggling concern with a stint (showing PR smarts) as a stalwart in the church choir. On Balthazar’s refusing to proceed with a load, he ties to his tail and lights a string of firecrackers, a “tag line” of sorts. (The tag line of his short and sadistic rule over Tim is to fire him, “send him back to wherever he came from.”) Whereas Jack is sent packing by Justine—not before he smashes some dishes and emits some Alpha menace—Gerard is left to run his course, killing Balthazar. Thus the emissions of that precedent add to the complex assessment of Justine’s play upon the sense, “… life on Earth is evil… we’re alone…” (An adjunct to the recourse to Bresson’s hard, apocalyptic and melancholy love comes to us from the snippets of slow motion horror and ecstasy that lead off this wild ride. For a moment we see Justine in that wedding dress she has continually unfastened and fastened like carriage trade stripper. Now she’s lying on her back in a body of water, ever-so-slowly drifting our way, with a peaceful look on her usually tightened face. In Bresson’s Mouchette (1967), a young adolescent girl drowns herself by rolling down a river bank covered in fabric for a wedding dress that didn’t materialize, given to her by a quietly sympathetic Good Samaritan whose encroachment on the shambles of her family life she repulses with, “You bitch!”
The close framing of that ghostly cruise is taken up in the launch of the mundane flashback, Justine and Michael in a very long, white stretch limo, negotiating with utmost difficulty the narrow and winding country lane leading to Claire’s chateau. This is an incongruous moment of giddiness for the (sort of) star-crossed lovers, seen (by a twisting-about hand-held camera) pressed close to the ceiling at the back of the vehicle as they crane their necks and twist about to get a bead on the non-progress the novice driver is making. (There is also a moment of her peering from a back window, shot from below, where she seems to have dwarfed the monster car. Then she’s behind the wheel, laughing her head off, but somehow squashed into that plush cockpit. With this follow-up to the supernal visuals of the opening moment of the major death throes—every bit a match for the Prelude to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, the frisson of which comprises an overtone for [desultory] discovery of loving transparency as closely implicated with death—we have on our hands Alice getting pointed toward a Wonderland chock-a-block with perplexity [“You’re not even looking”/ “I can see it’s not very good”], tumbles and almost too good to be true wonderment. (Mouchette’s very short-lived, inflected taste of the delights life has to offer involves operating a bumper car, lurching, twisting, laughing for once, and never again.) That would raise the stakes of the world of the Lilac Fairy to center upon full-fledged justness, as quite distinct from domestic happiness. (I don’t have to tell you where the Mad Hatter pops up, when we have a figure at a sumptuous table, pocketing spoons and befuddling hapless serving staff and hoping to be getting somewhere with the giggling Betties—drinking a lot of wine, but no tea, despite his plummy accent; and actually sort of charming Justine, the X-rated Alice. Claire’s little boy, Leo (part of a cast of woodland creatures on steroids), refers to Justine as Aunt Steelbreaker (or is that, Aunt Stillbreaker?), and he often pesters her about the “magic cave” they’re going to explore together. (Perhaps the primary function of this Wonderland motif is to moot the possibly dream-driven, edifying, rescindable, futural implication of the apparently game-ending meltdown. Or, on the other hand, to underline the real-time saga as posing creative follow-through upon a less unlucky and less unloving planet. One place to start that follow-through, would relate to an excursion from the party to trash Claire’s Suprematist graphics display in favor of Brueghel prints with their claustrophobic preoccupation with death. [An instance of that visual rendition of pious gloom briefly flashes our way at the doomsday prologue, and thereby fortifies the possibility that that whole movement is the prelude to a dream.] Justine’s scorched earth comportment toward modern world history does call out for some form of circumspective amelioration.)
Nothing like a death star to get a lot of critters buzzing about. But Melancholia is not simply a sharply arranged encyclopedia. As already on tap to some extent, suffusing this embrace of great daring from years gone by, there is film drama of riveting immediacy. The constellation of Justine and Claire (masterfully and unsparingly achieved by actresses Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg) is preponderantly shot in extreme close-up, delivering to us sensibilities activating a rarely noticed showdown of equilibrium with its stunning galaxies of courage. During one of her countless excursions away from the hub of consummate nightlife, Justine catches up with her mother, asleep in a guest room and wakes her, to say, “Mom, I’m scared.” Getting past her Mom’s hobby horse that marriage is form of suicide, she adds, “… it’s something else… I’m freezing… I have trouble walking… I’m scared!” Her Mom, after a rare pause, says, “We all are, Sweetie. Just forget it…” That Justine will not forget it is the motor of this movie, and the conjurer of the Princess, the woman in the dunes, the child bride, Marie, Belle, Mouchette and Alice. (It also conjures the raw scribble-through-spilled-milk title frame, the spitting image of the lithographic touch David Lynch has retreated to.) There is a cut, from this mother-daughter interview, to Justine, seen from across the dance floor, a wallflower at her own party, her face ashen and toneless, her eyes deadened. Then she’s whisked away by Claire, to the bar, and made to chug down a lot of cognac, leading her to give one of her vaguely terrifying smiles. Michael comes over, ever the good sport, and gulps down a bit of that four-digit booze. Claire, by this time fighting as big a wave of nausea as that consuming her sister (on whom she often confers the despairing touch, “Sometimes I hate you so much!”), rallies the troops—a Delphine Seyrig over-the-cliff rigid joviality covering her face, so well according with that Angst-star’s speciality of effete doom—to hit those Marienbad gardens and join in champagne and the launching of dainty little hot-air balloons carrying inscriptions of wishes for marital happiness. In the semi-darkness, we catch glimpses of the sisters having recaptured, for a few seconds anyway, some real smiles. In their bedroom, Justine and Michael show nothing but exhaustion. Then she unfastens her dress, he takes off his jacket and pants, they do some French kissing (half-hearted, particularly in light of a similar interlude earlier, where they were truly cooking, only to have her suddenly slipping away [“Bye”], on the unspoken pretext that there is so much left to do). Her face and body are numbed and she shows a quietly irritable embarrassment in being so unsuited for love. “Give me a moment… Just give me a moment… Can I have a moment, please?” Her anguished wedding day (with its nocturnal gesture of reciprocating to the loving gift of pulsating starry beauties) comes to us as a physical confirmation that what is stake for her is a cosmic visitation of love that takes cosmic means to live up to. (Prominently in aid of setting the pace for this overture in vast human nature, as something other than non-vast human personality, is the Prelude to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, rhapsodically washing over many of Justine’s moments of truth, most hauntingly at von Trier’s Prelude where singular gravity is expressed by hauntingly fluid slow motion.) By the time she has slipped away again and is seeing him off, with, “What did you expect?” she’s kissed goodbye to smiling at anyone. Her face that, shot from below and from a best-side (accentuating high cheekbones) at the beginning of the reception, carried tinctures of youthful promise, now ploughs into us head-on, giving her an androgynous and biologically depleted death mask.
It is the film’s second passage, where Justine returns to the palace for repairs rather than forced rejoicing, that provides the most pointed glimpse of the binary star nature of the two sisters. Claire had, the morning after the unforgettable party, gently supported Justine’s maintaining that she had “tried.” During the reception, Claire had become increasingly apparent as instrumental in setting her up with someone wholesome and unreflective, a man she would never have taken seriously on her own (they both being hirelings of Jack) but coming into play at a time when the perils of solitude were becoming insupportable. But now Claire redirects her caring to an attempt to rouse Justine out of her pronounced doldrums. However, at the moment when she needs some Lilac Fairy spark, her confidence and competence dwindle in the shadow of the death star which conventional wisdom declares to be harmless. While Claire plunges into trembling fear regarding this horror (her face ravaged, her mouth freezing and struggling to maintain adult articulation), Justine finds in its monumentality and ravishing intensity a source of poise. She does not, however, find it to be a source of sustained love by which she could reciprocate for her sister’s generosity. While Claire shudders at the sight of the looming lavender monstrosity, Justine’s eyes fill with awe and the beginning of a smile crosses her face. In the middle of the night, Claire is out on the patio, close to suffocating with terror. She is unseen by Justine, who walks out across that Marienbad darkness, comes to a vantage point by the sea and gazes lovingly at that arresting body, while Claire, who had followed her, watches desolately. Then Justine, now nude, reclines on the rock, strokes a hand across her breasts and smiles. She is beyond the Princess, in having embraced her (double) moonlight-texture wedding dress, beyond Belle in having eschewed smallish suitors, and beyondAlicein having come to one hell of an inflection upon world history. But, in face of Claire’s “I’m afraid,” she goes on to pull that cheap critique of bourgeoise sensibility: “A glass of wine together, maybe? How about a song? Maybe we could light some candles…” (During her regaining her appetite, she contracted a sudden craving for chocolates and sweet jam. The Princess, graduating from her donkey skin disguise to marrying a wimp, joins the latter in singing, “What will we do with so much love? We’ll do what’s forbidden!” and tying into a feast of desserts.) Claire struggles against trembling, looks downwards and whispers, “That would make me happy.”
From this dismal hatefulness—reminiscent of the superficial Princess to true royalty once, when preparing a “Cake d’Amour” (“Love Cake”) for an ailing prince she hadn’t met, with her dead mother’s presence helping her along while they sang a song, a lovely duet to simple and powerful joys—Justine moves on to give us a marvellously inflected denouement. The birds have begun to drop; the electrical charges have started to stream out of power lines, and fingers; and Leo feels afraid. His father had committed suicide in the stables with Claire’s overdose and the fly-by seems to have been an illusion. Justine tells him that that gloomy take forgets about the “magic cave,” its doorway to brightness that works. She and he cut branches to make a little house of sticks, she brings Claire to their spot overlooking the sea and the sky-filling juggernaut. She tells Leo to close his eyes; she takes Claire’s hand and his hand. Claire’s face is full of terror and she cries; then she quietens, frozen with fear, but struggling to keep her eyes on the star. Justine looks at them quietly, braces herself and they disappear in a gigantic sheet of electrodynamics, a crescendo of nature at war with itself. Leo had asked, “Can anybody make that cave? Justine (whom he always, rather puzzlingly, referred to as Aunt Steelbreaker [long ago, on his Grandpa’s side, there was an issue of alchemy]), unsmilingly, tells him, “I’m not anybody.” It is remarkable that a scenario about the end of human life could still compellingly maintain the urgency of being not just anybody.
