Fittingly for a film called Melancholia, Lars von Trier’s (I think the word is ‘controversial’) latest effort begins with the end of the world. Set to Wagner, of course. We see a pretentious and stunning procession of slo-mo apocalyptic scenes: Kirsten Dunst with some moths, a horse falling over, that sort of thing. Then the planet Melancholia crashes into Earth. (Honestly, who calls a new planet ‘Melancholia’?) It’s much more fun than Terrence Malick’s sub-Fantasia bit of CGI dinosaurs and classical music in The Tree of Life, in any case.
After that it’s largely an exercise in dramatic irony. ‘I’m the luckiest man in the world’, says Dunst’s new husband. Lucky you. At the wedding, rich people I don’t care about mope and bicker in a luxurious country house. The sense of doom drains from me like Kirsten Dunst urinating on a golf course. Maybe I wouldn’t mind if these people died in flames after all.
Trier (he made up the ‘von’) makes you feel melancholic. Melancholic as in when there doesn’t seem to be anything nice left in the world. When there’s nothing to miss except some squabbling over privileged people. The feeling of melancholia was captured for me in one marvellous sequence of a straggly haired Charlotte Gainsbourg basking uncomfortably in sunlight no longer warm and golden but sickly pale. ‘The Earth is evil’, or so Kirsten Dunst says. Maybe I was meant to be bored by the squabbling. So when the world finally ends it doesn’t seem all that much of a bother.
