(DK/SWE/FRA/GER - 2011)
Directed by Lars Von Trier, with Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, John Hurt and Alexander Skarsgård. Lars Von Trier was nominated for the Palme d'Or and Kirsten Dunst won the Best Actress Award in 2011 Cannes Film Festival. I can predict many other nominations and awards for this film.
So, what do we have here? A film about a planet called Melancholia, on the verge of colliding with Earth and destroying all the life as we know it. But Melancholia, the film, is far from having a cliché sci-fi plot with a shallow background story and far from being an apocalyptical film as what we're used to. It is a unique portrait of human feelings, expectations and frustrations, counting on great performances by the main actresses.
The film is divided into two parts, which focus in one of the sisters Justine (Kirsten Dunst) or Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who have a troubled relation. Part 1 shows us Justine's wedding party, which started late due to a problem with Justine and Michael's (her husband, Alexander Skarsgård) limousine. The party seems to be going well until when Claire and Justine's father (John Hurt) decides to make a speech and is interrupted by their mom (Charlotte Rampling), who is totally against marriages. After this, the guests go dancing and we think everything's gonna be ok, but then Justine starts to act weirdly without any apparent reason, keeping everyone away and ruining her own party, for which she waited for a long, long time.
I was really impacted by watching this whole part, Kirsten Dunst is awesome in her role and makes us feel uncomfortable for her behaviour and Charlotte is also very convincing as the older, caring sister, making us think of how we'd react if such a situation happened to someone close to us. There isn't a clear mention to Melancholia in this part yet. When Justine and Michael arrive for the party, Justine asks the wedding planner (Udo Kier) about a red star in the sky, and that's the only astrological-related dialogue we see here.
In Part 2, Justine develops some sort of disease who makes her numb and unmotivated and comes to live with Claire, her husband John (Kiefer Sutherland) and son Leo (Cameron Spurr). In this part, we know more about Melancholia and see how four different people deal with the planet's imminent approach. Claire starts to feel scared and obsessed, John is confident that nothing bad is gonna happen, Leo is very excited about the "Passage". Justine seems to be unnaturally calm, attracted to the phenomenon and to know more about it than the others. She claims to know "things", such as the number of beans in a bottle on the night of the party. According to her, in one of the most outstanding lines of the film, "the Earth is evil, we don't need to grieve for it". It's interesting how, here, there's a switch of roles: Justine isn't the inconsequent person we saw in Part 1 and Claire also isn't as rational as we might have thought she was. There's a point in the film where I wasn't sure of what was really going to happen, and that catched my attention until the very ending.
Melancholia has an amazing photography and a breathtaking instrumental soundtrack. The first minutes are mindblowing and visually gorgeous. The final scene hit me like a train. Many sequences reminded me of 2001, and I believe that obviously isn't a coincidence. The director is a sensitive Lars Von Trier, who didn't fail in capturing the fear, the resignation and the hopes of a broken family shaken by an event of enourmous proportions. In this family, we can identify the humankind as a whole.
To answer my own question: what we have here is a must-see film, a gripping masterpiece.
