Should it be any wonder that in a film titled, “Melancholia” the opening scene would be a wedding? In the first of many humorous and light touches, von Trier has the soon-to-be weds exchanging places with the chauffeur of a very large limo in a series of efforts to thread the car through a hairpin turn to an isolated castle where they’ll exchange their vows.
As wry as the film can be, it is also savage and sad – it takes on that ultimate problem, the solitary confinement we are born into.
“Melancholia” is a breathtaking film – restless, eviscerating. A film driven by anger and loss – a crystalline sense of the pat and futile in life. Two sisters, two planets – bipolar conditions. Each irresistably drawn into the orbit of the other – a “dance of death,” its described. The weaknesses as parades of men and the innocence of children. A yearning for a return to that state of grace – parents, competition; approval, denial. Anxiety, elation. Doubt, confidence. Surrounded and alone. Our lives are nothing if not the pendulum’s swing from one end to another.
“Melancholia” shows bodies colliding – exquisite, intimate, unconsolably lonely and anonymous jointness – rituals as choking as ashes. Relations as atomized and joyless as to defy reason to our lives, abandoned expectations and empty purpose. There is no directionality or point to our lives, the film seems to say – there is only the fiction we write, and the lies we tell to get others to share it with us.
And at the end, can anything be more intimate than a shared death? Is that not the height of our coupling, the ringing in the ear after sex, that dizziness at the height of sensation?
“Melancholia” opens with a brilliant piece of foreshadowing. At a wedding of reversals, late entrances, bafflingly poor outcomes for everyone. The two-part film builds its emotional core within the unsatisfied yearning of almost everyone in the party – from the wastefully naive and gallant groom to the solitary child guest. Despite their desperate efforts, no one is complete. Its only in the final moments of the film, hung in a ridiculously magical moment of intimacy, two sisters and a child complete each other as forces far greater than anything earth has known propel their lives to their cataclysmic end.
