Absolutely you should see it, on a theater if possible (Angelika is the only place in NYC still showing it, this week and next). Before "Melancholia" all the features of von Trier I've seen have felt like poison to my cinephile-loving senses. Now I want to have Lars' babies. :-)

Outta my way you BITCH!

He's MINE!!!

Yo

Got it. Will watch tomorrow more than likely-- I pinched myself a copy today of the new CC Gojira 2-discer, (my birthday present to myself, 45 yrs old wretched as I was just telling Sir Zedz in PM) and must of course do some formal writhing in paroxysms of pulpy joy.

Same here. Saw Dogville first, it clicked with me straight away ... But I think swo's generally right, and hearing the conversations at the Melancholia screening drove home just how not-for-all-tastes he is, even in a relatively accessible and aesthetically beautiful movie like this.

At least you're not fucking 62....

MWAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I went in blind to Breaking the Waves during its original run, not even reading a review, and came out a convert. People really don't seem to get his sense of humor. I remember a dude who was outraged that the directors name was bigger than the title on the BtW poster, like a Danielle Steele paperback. I really wish he would do more comedy, I love The Kindgdom and Boss of it All.

Regarding the Hitchcock Birds nod, I wouldn't be surprised, as the promotional photos for Antichrist had LvT posing with a dead crow, an homage to the famous Hitchcock promo shot.

Of course it's open to interpretation, but my take was that the film's stunning opening sequence shows us Justine's psychic vision of the future - each element of that vision is elaborated upon over the course of the film.

As to von Trier's canon, his earlier "dogma"-enforced work left me cold, but there was something about ANTICHRIST that drew me in instead of repelling me. MELANCHOLIA completely won me over (apart from the incessant hand-held camerawork).

My first film was Dogville, and by the time the credits rolled with the Bowie song, I had a grin ear to ear. I never looked back and I watched Manderlay (which I think might be better than Dogville and is underrated in general) and Dancer in the Dark the same week.

I still haven't been able to track down a copy of Breaking the Waves. I don't understand why his films are so hard to find in the US.

I've still never watched Dogville. Much like some other films/TV shows/video games, etc (still haven't sat down and watched Inland Empire, for example) - I've got it in the figurative cellar - I know it'll be a wonderful bottle of wine/champagne/beer when I open it, so I want to wait until the right time to do so.

Fwiw, I started off with The Element of Crime, then Europa, followed by Dogville.
I liked them all, with increasing intensity.
Later, Breaking the Waves didn't make much impression one way or the other.
But I considered myself a von Trier fan of sorts.

Until Anti-Christ which I thought was silly and nutzoid.
And I really disliked Melancholia.
The camerawork grew tiresome quickly, but also I just didn't like any of these irritating people. I guess in one way it was successful, because if those folks represent the human race, then I too was untroubled by the end of the world, even wishing it happened sooner.
For me, von Trier has veered off into territory which I find annoying and full of pretentious portentousness.

he'd love that description!

Well I watched this film and have been letting it gestate for a few days before commenting so I can be as clear about what it isabout this film that Doesn't Do It For Me.

It was not that the characters and the story gave me the allergic rash--- a cats and dogs thing-- that I usually get when watching LVT. It didn't irritate me in that way and watching the film was in no way a really unpleasant experience, which is a first for me and this director.

Something that's going on here however is something that also irritated me slightly in WINTERS BONE, another recent film that otherwise had a lot going for it with me, and it's the same thing I vented about in the thread for the film BABEL:

Melancholia struck the same nerve with me. That said, let me clarify that it should be fairly obvious by now, at least to those forum members that I've batted subjects around with over the years, that the cinema of depression and gloom is an exquisite delicacy for me. Hence my love for French Impressionism, the Avant Garde, with its treatment of sadnes, isolation, extreme melancholy, autumnal gloom. Declaration of one's personal afflictions--particularly the affliction of depression-- shouldn't perhaps be a precursor to the enjoyment of a film about dislocated souls, but god knows it's a terrain I alas all too well, with many a certain kind of shambles trailing behind me, friendships and opportunities laid waste by vagueries of what I presume to be my own behavior, like a hideous record being repeatedly played whose rhytm section I can't quite wrap my head around.

There's something about--aside from what I considered the most hamhanded metaphor I've seen in a very long while.. (a planet called Melancholia on a collision course with earth? is the well that run dry?)--but this is a minor quibble, because for better or for worse LVS's treatment of the script was well done--there's something about these pale, bloodless twentyfirst century faces, wracked by angst and scarred by the trials of life. . . very popular actors and actresses tearing their beauty to shreds for an ambitious performance displaying their interior pain and anguish, that strikes me as distinctly.. er, childish and uninspiring.

Mind you I'm only talking about my own personal taste here. There are, for me, two basic kinds of cinema: cinema that causes you to respond to the content (and perhaps the beauty) that is resident within its images and narrative (and sounds), and then there is cinema that causes you to respond to both the content (and perhaps beauty) within the film . . . as well as the beauty that rises up within yourself as a result of watching the film. Beauty being a very broad term, horror can be beautiful, sadness can be beautiful, confusion and a certan uncertainty can be beautiful.

A film that (for me) is in the former category, with some beautiful images, is Melancholia (especially the prelude). A film that transits the same territory as Melancholia, but is for me in the far more sublime secondary category--in that it turns the inside of myself into a deeply affecting work of art while I'm sitting and responding to all that onscreen beauty--is for example Mario Piexoto's LIMITE.

Here you have two films dealing with people thrown into the margins of human existence by states of extreme melancholy. The boat that the "adrift" people are in in LIMITE is, in essence, the bathtub for Dunst in Melancholia.

I think what it is that is the dealbreaker for me when touching on the subject of gloom and melancholy-- they've been parts of my life for so long-- is whether or not these are simply crushing states of total nonutility and nonescape, or whether or not there is something at least usable here too.

Some kind of inner awakening, some connection to something, some finding of the sublime even here; or to put it conversely, something other than the flat portrayal of a completely dysfunctional human seemingly unable to do anything but, with a knowing smile of understanding, proceed to her own obliteration. This is simply straight unadulterated hopelessness, and it doesn't really make poetry with me when it attempts to bed down with my mind and heart. Aside from the fact that I believe certain states of mind are better personified symbolicallly and atmospherically rather than directly in-character (to avoid a sense of preening wailing) it's too dissolute a statement for me: it's not that I don't believe melancholia can destroy people, ie the obvious fact of suicide. It's just too humorless, too uninspirational, too poor an instruction vis a vis perseverance despite one's own uncanny ability to fuck up everything one lays one's hands on.

In essence, it's just not my cup of tea. Dunst's character confused just a touch in a clinical sense, has obviously survived functionally for many years out in the world, a consistently successful female, to where she was depended upon by a professional marketing co., seen to be functional or sane enough to be worth the risk of spending tens of thousands on for a wedding ceremony, if her breakdown was so complete that she became that dysfunctional in all of life's aspects, it rings less of melancholia and more like a sudden and unexpected attack of bipolarism, her lack of repercussion-self-awareness, and empathetic communication with her surrounding benefactors seems so complete.

Don't want to subtract from some obviously very deep love for this film-- my experience is no more valid than anybody's. So this is one man's opinion based upon a first viewing. But I wanted to add my thoughts as promised to Brother Hare.

^^^ Are you at least glad you saw the movie HerrSchreck? Sounds like you respect what LVT attempted and understand why some of us love it (it was my #1 favorite movie of 2011, tied with "Another Earth") even though you didn't seem to have liked that the story doesn't offer light interludes to sweeten the path toward the movie's inevitable conclusion. Just the fact you are able to not curse the name of LVT for making "Melancholia" shows the man at least tackled the subject and presented it on-screen in a way that got to you enough to get your tacital passing nod for 'good enough.'

What I do get and I guess Schreck doesn't get from the film is the sense of exhilaration. Doubly so, first from the instantaneous recognition of the depressive state, and the wit to marry it to a classic piece of melancholic art like the Tristan Prelude, with all the High Romantic intimations of "liebestod", as though the two planets are engaged on an unstoppable amour fou/sexual fusion that can only lead to their decimation. This is akin to me to marrying up High 19th Century "ecstatic" art movements like Scriabin and the Mysticals/Metaphysicists with post modern Weimar era post Freudian formalists. It's quite an achievement.

The other element of complete exhilaration for me is the way in which LVT compeltely shifts the character focus in the second act from Dunst to Claire and her husband and the way he observes the responses of "normal" people to impending universal catastrophe. So that when the end comes, as Justine already knows so well, it's welcome. THe film is - so to speak - transcendentally atheist. I simply can't imagine a believer getting much out of it. Not that Im saying a he's a believer or otherwise. But Melancholia is as far away from the expressionist/Weimar film era that Schreck (and I) love as I could ever imagine.

So I'm glad Brother Schreck has watched it, especially considering the last couple of years and the whats and wherefores of life....

Sure I was glad that I watched it, it was far from an unpleasant experience. And it certainly had nothing to do with whether or not provided lighter interludes on the way to the films inevitable conclusion.It was that it lacked any real resonance or power for me. . . I have no problem with the blackest of black melancholy or the most sinister narratives on the face of the earth this provided that it is going somewhere narratively.

and my god this certainly has nothing to do with religion nobody is more atheist than I am, that 1 really came from left field david.

Take a film like taxi driver . . it has always been one of my favorite films of all time. Here you have a tale of a man descending into such depths of depression that he literally explodes in a frenzy of blood and gore, unable to take it any longer. as a narrative element he doesn't just sit there as a lump on a log merely wallowing. he reflects, he converses with his own interior world, reflects on the world outside considers what put him there in his condition and what might get him out if getting out is at all possible. . . which the end suggests is not.

Wallowing doesn't appeal to me, which is what the film seemed an exercise in. have less to do with expressionism versus impressionism versus the avant garde versus poetic realism versus new wave versus japanese classic golden age filmmaking. This is in no way to suggest that the fans of the film enjoy wallowing,etc. Alot of this is me and my gut reactions., and trying to explain them in an understandable fashion. Im posting this from my phone which is a klunky ppain,more tomorrow...

No I never expected we'd see each other in church bro. (No slight intended....)

I think Lars once again divides people. The interesting thing now is to see if he keeps up what I think was at least here a real formal control over the elements.

Schreck if you really want to run the bath and pour a nembutal cocktail catch AntiChrist. It sent me sceaming from the room. It's literally ball crushing in fact.

I still have not yet gotten to Melancholia yet but a few of these comments interested me a lot - firstly Herr Schreck saying: "Here you have two films dealing with people thrown into the margins of human existence by states of extreme melancholy. The boat that the "adrift" people are in in LIMITE is, in essence, the bathtub for Dunst in Melancholia.", reminded me a lot of those later Bergman films that I most like, Shame and The Passion of Anna (where the main characters are literally adrift or have the outside world dissolve around them as it appears to be reacting to their internal crises).

I'd also love to know what both of your takes would be on Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse, which feels as if it mines similar territory.

Then david hare talking above about the "Mysticals/Metaphysicists" reminded me, of all things, of Kevin Smith on an episode of the BBCs arts review programme from a couple of years ago, 2009 I think. He was one of the four guests on the show talking (predictably) about the influx of graphic novels and superhero adaptations and near the end of the discussion he talked of the way that the next century was looking likely to be characterised less by capital-R 'Religion' in art and the wider world but rather by themes of individually defined traditions of Mysticism. The rest of the guests reacted in utter horror at the 'wooliness' of that kind of concept becoming commonplace over religious ideas, but I think he made a very interesting point.

Finally, I seem to remember that david hare does not really like this film, but I'm wondering whether Death In Venice could bear any comparison to Melancholia? That ill-defined unease with your place in the world leading towards an inevitable (as if the plague in Venice was created just for that character to catch it) death in the presence of great beauty.


We should bear in mind though that doesn't Lars von Trier consider this film a failure, in the sense that it is too commercial/accessible? It wouldn't surprise me if something calculated to alienate this new fan base turns up next!

Anything Lars says about any of his films should be taken with a Lot's Wife of salt. My theory is that this film was one of his most personal and (eek!) sincere, and so it's the one he's probably most desperate to distance himself from in order to preserve his bad-boy street cred (sigh). Hence comments like that and, you know, the Hitler nonsense.

OK, back on a real keyboard--

Dave, no offense taken. . . it'd require lots of hard work on your end for me to take pronounced offense from you, our on and off air convo's have borne too much mutual respect and positive intellectual benefit for me to latch on to a post on a transitory topic reflecting passing frames of mind. . . . Maybe it was my goof about Tex zapping paper clips at "Saint" Paul of Tarsus (he, Paul, is as loathsome a creature in my mind as can be, the biggest villain of the New Testament, the man most responsible for morphing a generally positive message of non-judgmentalism into the poisonous, judgmental mindset of the church today).

Anyhow, to boil it down, it's the essential inaction of the Dunst character, her lack of reflection, expression of cognizance of the repercussions of her behavior that reads more like bipolarism than clinical depression. I know several people who are precisely like that. My last ex came from an entirely bipolar family, had a bipolar, mother, father, and twin brother, she fought the pull of gravity within her own endocrine system and moved to the opposite coast of her family to strain against this heap of biological and emotional circumstance seemingly urging her towards total dysfunction. Through extraordinary self-awareness and self-observation, cultivation of what eventually through practice became an automatic examination of her unthought emotional responses to various situations before acting upon and honoring those unthinking urges, she became an extraordinary individual of incredible sweetness and self-reflection. Her twin is institutionalized (psych, not prison), this after a life filled with substance abuse and all manner of dissolution. But she is a unique individual of impressive interior powers of self-examination and capability for internal plan-making, coming up with her own regimens of self-adjustment vs impulse, sticking to these regimens for years and turning into a pretty remarkable and entirely original human being . . . she and her family and others reveal the great difficulty of dealing with bipolar individuals; these are souls who are truly the most impossible to negotiate with, esp vs the kind of difficulties Dunst cultivated during the wedding.

Colin, if you haven't seen Peixoto's LIMITE, strain to the bursting point to see it! I can't imagine what the holdup is in getting someone like MoC or CC or silent specialists i e Kino-Milestone-Flicker A to get this out into R1. Even a non English friendly edition would be a cinch if we could order it from SA: Peixoto (pron approx Pih SHO to), a great admirer of Murnau (though the film is far more along the lines of what the French and Soviet AGarde's were up to at the time . . . which now that I think about it-- I'm surprised that this didn't pop up on any of the AG sets from either Image/Anthology or Kino's three sets) placed only a couple of intertitles in the film, which one can easily translate in a heartbeat. Which I in fact did when I rec'd a copy of the penultimate restoration that preceded the last one that was presented at Cannes in 2007. That last 2007 resto is about as beautiful as the film will ever look for us, although the version of Satie's (Debussy orch'd) Gymnopedie 3 used in the opening montage is a bit too slow for my taste.

It's as hopeless a narrative as Melancholia-- one man and two women are adrift out at sea, going nowhere, heads hung low, clothes unkempt and ragged, man unshaven, not bothering to row away from their place of dislocation, barely mustering the will to even eat. (an explanation of the film's narrative, conception, and making here. Like LVT's film, LIMITE opens with a montage sequence, a prelude if you will, of hardwrought images of intense beauty that are a haiku of the narrative to come.

The opening montage of LIMITE is as beautiful as anything made anywhere and at any time. I was actually going to post on LIMITE for my next blog post under the heading "VICTIMS". At the conclusion of the opening montage, the film reverts to a more leisurely style of montage, not as densely packed as the opening but no less beautiful as it settles into its rhythm of stunning, languid imagery, as it tells the separate tales of what brought each of the three lost souls to this state of total surrender vs the tribulations of their existences. After the unfolding of the third tale (in which Peixoto plays a small, on-camera part), we return to present time in the drifting, aimless boat.

The rhythm

I guess nobody wants to pull the trigger and risk releasing something that very few will buy. Peixoto never made another film, and he made this as a very very young man (almost the Rimbaud of cinema). But what really surprises me is that there hasn't even been a Brazilian DVD of this film since the last restoration. My copy of that resto--which was based from the final positive print of the film that remained which was, years ago, desperately rushed into the lab with desperately acquired funding as decomp had already begun on the nitrate-- comes from a broadcast of the film on ARTE France. The Brazilians are quite proud of their obscure native son, and the film is often ranked the greatest their country has produced.

Depression, it's obvious, always makes for fertile cinematic grounds, since to greater and lesser degrees, all humans feel it, and derive great comfort via connecting with others through it, and recognizing that they're not alone feeling it-- and derive a particular refreshment in comprehending a surprising fellowship in experiencing a kind of awful and destructive extremity of life experience within its clutches.

Agreed about the divisive nature of LVT. Colin your statement about his disowning of the film because of its accessibility reminds me of Kurt Cobain, post Nevermind!

And definitely agreed with Dave about the control LVT exhibits over the formal elements-- it's without question in every possible aspect the tightest film I've seen by him. I didn't chance ANTICHRIST however. . . there's so much unseen material out there to yet watch (and to originate) , that, to paraphrase Lube on the RUNAWAY MELODRAMAS Eclipse thread, there's already too few hours in the day/days in the year/years in a lifetime to sit with something that'll probably see me sitting with a fistful of my own hair by the conclusion. . . .

Colin, I don't know whether you intended this but any reply I could give to you about Death in Venice would probably mirror in large part the negative reactions of other people to Melancholia.

Namely this: the complete wallowing in self loathing that hallmarks the film - this seems to me the attitude V strikes for the gay/gay friendly art house crowd of the early 70s. Of course the attitude and the implied internalized homophobia are completely at odds with Visconti's own life of Riley as a very out, wealthy and generously boyfriended fag swanning around the Euro jetset withMassimo/Alain/Helmut et al on his arm. It's this fact that Visconti is so obviously comfortable with his homosexuality that makes the self hating homophobia of his few gay characters so egregiously offensive to me as an artistic choice.

DiV now loos like middlebrow arthouse trash, fairy floss dressed up as art with the (now unbearable cliche of) Mahler 5 Adagietto dragging its audience sobbing to the Kleenex box. Compare it and the use of music for instance to Sautet's sublime wedding of Ravel chamber music to narrative and character in un Coeur en Hiver.

So I can't see any comparibility to Melancholia with the subject or the characters, or the formal elements of the picture. In total contrast to the formal elegance and simplicity of Lars's movie, DiV is the first of all Visconti's remaining pictures to formally abandon any pretence to mise en scene, subsituting instead totally overly fussy decor, costumes and unrestained abandoned reliance on the fucking zoom lens.

Many thanks however for your two recommendations - I think I can track down the two movies you mentioned around the backalleys and crannies here.

Voila!

I keep remembering and then forgetting to mention Lars' debt to Tarkovsky. Schreck defined the business of the three (four including the boy) souls seemingly isolated from the rest of humanity waiting for the end of the world. Although Lars dedicates the previous movie AntiChrist to Tark it's Melancholia that really pays this due, in particular to the Sacrifice, another chamber piece at the end of the world. Of course Tark's films seem to embody some form of redemption or spirituality/mystery where Lars' do not at all.

I saw Breaking the Waves first and found it surprisingly modest given all the critical talk of pretense and pomposity surrounding Dogme 95. I liked everything Von Trier has done before Melancholia and Antichrist.

edit: I now see that I'm of the same opinion as Lemmy, basically.

The final shot of "Melancholia" makes HitFix Kristopher Tapley's TOP TEN SHOTS OF 2011 column (obvious spoiler of how the movie ends if you click the link).

I've watched the film myself now!!! Yes, definitely Tarkovsky-inflected throughout, especially in that opening prologue where Bruegel's Hunters In The Snow smouldering in slow motion feels like it is bringing together the pre-flight bonfire scene (the camera moving out from the picture of Hari to show it being consumed with flames along with Kris's other papers) and the library scene from Solaris together. And then you have the Tarkovskian horse falling to the ground in the prologue (rather than rising as in Andrei Rublev) and being used as a symbol of man's cruelty with Justine whipping it to the ground.


I do think Schreck has a valid point - Melancholia is slightly problematic for me in the sense that we get no idea of Justine's life before the wedding. Has Justine been playing a part successfully for a long time and entering into a marriage simply because it is the 'normal thing to do' has been the final straw in her sanity? Or has she been like this for a long time, in which case why is everyone so upset with her? As she says to Michael when he is leaving: "But Michael...what did you expect?"

Did he assume that he would be the one to save her?

This I think leads to the main idea of the wedding scene in Melancholia, the way that everyone seems to trying to push and manipulate Justine around in the thinking that as long as she does certain proper things then everything will be fine. The people surrounding her seem much more upset that Justine is ruining the various moments by not acting properly than with the way she is feeling (Udo Kier is the funniest example as the wedding organiser, especially when he keeps holding up his hand to his face to block out Justine, stating that he is going to refuse to acknowledge her because of the way that she has ruined all of the careful planning, only to keep coming into contact with her a couple of extra times and having to duck out of the scene ostentatiously covering his face!)

Again is this just because they are in a reception after a wedding, where even the most 'sane' person has to keep up appearances; or is Justine pushed around this much outside of this one night (as suggested by her repulsive ad agency boss pestering her to work on a tagline during the evening)? Looking at the dysfunctional parents, the father is trying to self-medicate through sex (which Justine herself tries, first with Michael at the wrong time and then with the new ad agency recruit on the golf course), and the mother seems more like Justine but functional. Rampling is amazing in the short scenes that she appears in. She first seems as if she is the only one who sees that Justine is doing this for appearances, yet when she talks of Claire having been 'seduced' into the lifestyle, it seems as if she is not allowing for her daughters to exist in the world outside of her conception of them - as if because she recognises the rituals and rites as a sham, nobody else is allowed to take comfort in performing them, either for their own or for other people's benefit. She is the melancholic force on Justine in the first part (it is telling that they both end up taking separate baths in their rooms at the same point during the wedding ceremony), telling her to jack it all in when Justine comes to her for sympathy. And when Justine reaches out to her, more earthily grounded, father she finds him gone, even miswriting her name for one of the multiple Bettys that he is fooling around with in the rush to leave (or has he swapped his love for his two daughters into much less demanding sexual attention for a couple of identicallly named floozies?)

Knowing more about the world of those surrounding her would enable the audience to modify our views of Justine a lot, but then that would not present her as this representative of 'antisocial' norms. The film that came to mind the most while watching Melancholia was The Idiots - the characters in that film were pretending to 'spaz' publically in order to transgress social norms. In Melancholia Justine wanders off in private to have these moments, such as peeing on the golf course whilst looking up at the stars, in a similar attempt to release the tension caused by the reception and Claire and John's tight control.

That idea of someone saying to you "Don't embarrass me. Make sure you do not make a scene. Don't ruin this, like you always do. Do you know how much this is costing?", with the addition of the mother unhelpfully saying "Yes, throw it all away. This is not what you are anyway", is actually creating or enabling the circumstances for Justine to 'create a scene', as if that is what is expected of her. Those around her keep insisting that she keeps on doing things (cutting the cake, doing a dance, perfoming her conjugal duties on her wedding night), which makes her crises more public and steadily builds towards a breakdown. I love that moment of Justine leaving the picture of the apple orchard which Michael gives her (and tells her to keep with her for support) behind - another example of someone giving Justine something which they want her to use to stay calm and sane, forcing it on her to make themselves, rather than Justine, feel better. As if then they can write the situation off with a heavy sigh and a "well, I tried" shrug.

It is perhaps egotistical on Justine's part (and I assume that we are seeing most of this first part from Justine's psychological point of view that enables each of these coercions to feel like blows to the psyche) to assume that everyone is working in their own self interests and not for hers. After all they are all here for her! Yet there is that sense of pointlessness that I think she is recognising - that this marriage will not keep her sane, that cutting the cake or throwing the bouquet (another extremely funny scene where Justine slows to a stop and Claire comes up and perfunctorily chucks it down to the crowd below! Claire is practical to the end, doing anything to ensure that they stay on schedule, even if it means performing the action herself without thinking about the way that it is not a particularly significant gesture when she is doing it!) is not going to change her downward trajectory and that instead of running from it and keeping up appearances she should turn and embrace that darkness.

The sisters also feel as if they are running at different speeds. In the wedding Justine is slowing to an almost comatose standstill while Claire is so busy with trivialities that she does not have time to stop and think about the world around her (Very Jeanne Dielman-esque too. It is perhaps telling that the one scene in which Claire truly 'stops' for a moment, seemingly able to drop her guard, is the one where John disappears to commit suicide). Which is best technique for living? Neither seems to be any use in the wider scheme of things!

I like that in the Claire section Justine has come to a halt (apart from an Antichrist monologue about the natural world being evil) and we finally get to see what set of circumstances would drive John and Claire to share Justine's state of mind of utter pointlessness and futility. The practicalities of electricity (I like that moment when the cars fail to start because the computers have been fried - a nice, and frightening, new motif that can be used in disaster films - it also gets dealt with after the EMP strike takes place in that High School of the Dead anime series) and even the people fall away, leaving just the sisters and Claire's son in Bergmanesque isolation (with an Exterminating Angel twist of seemingly being unable to leave the estate - or is that just the pointlessness of doing so raising its head again? Does that mean that we could even think of the apocalypse simply being located in one country house? An apocalypse of the family? The dangers of leaving a couple of troubled characters alone together for too long to feed off of each other's energies, as in Persona?)

I suppose the tragedy is that Justine finally, through the boy, comes to appreciate doing some kind of pointless ritualistic task on behalf of keeping the spirits up of someone else (albeit totally destroying her sister's last remaining socialised notion of having a final glass of wine out on the balcony!) She and the boy ignore the tragedy of impending death that they can do nothing about (as most of us do!), build the stick cave and bring Claire with them, holding each others hands. The amusing part is that in those final moments Claire totally ruins the moment by pulling away and hugging herself (much as in the hailstorm on the golf course earlier she had dropped the boy unprotected in his pyjamas on the ground)! Apparently that image of Claire pulling away from the other two at the last moment wasn't intended by von Trier, but it does work as an amusing final touch! Has she broken the spell and doomed them all? Ironically ruined everything at the last moment?

Oh, and I like the nod to Lav Diaz in the 'Googling Melancholia' scene!

Wow. So I can't offer nearly as much enthusiasm for this film as I'm seeing here. I'm surprised it was received so well. I'd like to talk about the film briefly, but I must say, the excessive praise for the film in this thread has magnified its flaws for me. I don't dislike the film, but I have a lot of problems with it.

It starts out with a bunch of glossy non-sequiturs, some of which were striking (the first shot with the birds, the bush burning through the window), most of which felt phoney, overwrought, and ponderous. I have never liked von Trier's recent indulgence in ultra-slow motion, which has no more merit than the slow motion in a Zack Synder film. Most of the special effects-laden images seem like remixed shots from Antichrist, and I didn't like them there either. They are bold and direct, but I usually find them ugly and obvious. The imagery feels deliberately excessive, but to what end? There isn't enough in these images to convince me of their beauty: no compositional elegance to speak of, plodding metaphors, poorly drawn allusions. I like that the prologue establishes what will happen at the end of the film, but its operatics largely fell flat for me.

The film improved with Justine's section, which is well shot and competently acted. Yet so much still held it back. The writing is consistently flawed, with characterization so simplistic it feels like parody and a few poorly considered subplots (namely the whole tagline deal with her boss, and the completely unnecessary character she fucks in the sand pit). I buy Justine's depression in the second half, but her behavior in the first half is more problematic. Either she consciously, willfully sabotages her wedding, or she has more mental illnesses than a textbook on the subject. I also found it hard to reconcile her character with the situation she's ended up in, but I managed to push my suspension of belief a bit further so that didn't trouble me too much. The segment managed to sustain my interest, though, and some sequences were gorgeous (not to mention von Trier's excellent sense of humor, which is played very nicely throughout).

The Claire section felt more convincing in almost every respect, and it resolves everything as well as it could. I don't think that justifies much of what precedes this section, but at least it brings it somewhere. Justine finally becomes convincing, and I adore her poise at the end of the film, and her final humane gesture. The malaise that settles over the film can make it drag a little, but the inevitable conclusion helps drive us through. I loved the brief interlude with the snow. I'm not sure how I feel about Sutherland's character, a turn of events which left me skeptical, but that's a minor qualm. The final moments of the film are astounding, and while the last shot is overwhelming, I liked the preceding close-ups even more, with the gradual intensification of the soundtrack and the blue light playing on their faces.

Overall I thought the film decent, the film's last act and impressive final moments compensating for much of what came earlier, but it's too problematic to be enthusiastic about. On some level, it feels like the whole film is von Trier taking a jab at people who don't have mental illnesses. My issues with the film have little to do with Justine (who I mostly liked, and when I did doubt her behavior I gave it the benefit of the doubt, because I'm not especially familiar with clinical depression); my issues have more to do with how every other character is portrayed, which feels very "oh, look at how all these bourgeois folk who seem emotionally stable actually fall apart in the face of pressure". He makes Justine's death feel something like martyrdom, and I'm not sure what the point is. Like I said, I like where her character is at the end, the progression she makes. But von Trier robs virtually every other character of their humanity to make this progression possible. It's like he's saying Dunst is the only character worth caring about, and by extension, that people without crippling mental obstructions aren't worth his time.

So mixed feelings. But a worthwhile experience, certainly.