Melancholia

But here’s the thing: Von Trier got trapped by his own nervousness and inarticulacy, and blundered into the electrified third rail of European politics. You can’t make jokes about Hitler in public, and you still pretty much can’t say anything about the Nazis in France, where national guilt over the occupation remains a fact of life, 65 years after the war. But what von Trier was actually trying to talk about wasn’t stupid at all, and it’s directly relevant to the artistic method and themes of “Melancholia.” With its spectacular photography by Manuel Alberto Claro, the sumptuous costumes and the setting at a brooding Swedish castle, and von Trier’s insistent, almost hypnotic use of the orchestral prelude to Wagner’s opera “Tristan und Isolde,” this movie may be the ultimate cinematic expression of the German Romantic aesthetic, which was an enormous source of inspiration for Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. Furthermore, it isn’t quite correct or adequate to suggest that von Trier is trying to redeem the Romantic tradition from its Nazi legacy. To use his own words, he “desired to dive headlong into the abyss of German Romanticism,” good and bad. He’s embracing all of it, the Eros and the Thanatos, the sensuality and the mannered artfulness and the love of destruction, the thread that leads from Goethe and Schubert to the worst crimes of the 20th century. He’s suggesting that the tendency that leads to magnificent art and poetry and the one that leads to totalitarianism and the one that leads to, say, the cheesiest grade of 1990s music videos are all essentially the same. As von Trier puts it, “Melancholia” is “slightly on the edge of plastic, here and there.”

The two sisters are Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), whose names are also given to the film’s sections. The planets are our own blue orb and another one, the eponymous Melancholia, which is 10 times bigger and has been “hiding behind the sun” and is now bound for a collision with Earth. (Von Trier has claimed that there’s at least some remote astronomical plausibility in “Melancholia,” but verisimilitude doesn’t strike me as the most important issue here.) Our dark sister planet makes only a guest appearance in “Justine,” the first section of the movie, as a strange red star in the constellation of Scorpio presiding forebodingly over the title character’s enormous wedding.

Von Trier plays with our expectations for these two actresses: Justine, played by a Hollywood star, is the blonde and conventionally beautiful one, who’s marrying a gorgeous if not impressively bright young man (Alexander Skarsgård) at her brother-in-law’s ostentatious country estate. But instead of being normal and well-adjusted, Justine is battling a crippling depression and keeps trying to escape from the whole wedding and from Skarsgård’s character, who’s totally out of his depth and has no idea how to reach her. In perhaps the most bitterly comic scene of “Justine” (and there are many), he shows her a snapshot of the apple orchard he has bought for her, that he hopes will make her happy. He has the best possible intentions, but you can feel her visibly recoiling from him as the seconds pass: I married this guy! And he has no idea who I am! When she gets up to go, she leaves the crumpled photograph on the sofa.

It’s Claire, played by an eccentric art-house brunette, who is the conventional one trying to keep the wedding party glued together as it disintegrates into hostility and pathology. In a later scene, Claire makes meat loaf, something I’m not convinced Charlotte Gainsbourg has ever done in real life. She’s married to a rich American prick (Kiefer Sutherland, who is perfectly cast in that role, of course) who owns the Swedish castle where the wedding takes place, and is inordinately fond of its 18-hole golf course. (We also see the flag atop the 19th hole a couple of times, which at many golf clubs is a euphemism for the bar, and here is — what, exactly? A gag? A von Trier symbol of apocalypse?)

Shot by Claro in gloriously rich colors, the “Justine” half of “Melancholia” is a rich comedy of manners and buried family secrets, deliberately recalling Bergman’s country-house comedies, like “Wild Strawberries” or “Smiles of a Summer Night,” and also perhaps “The Celebration,” by von Trier’s onetime Dogme 95 collaborator Thomas Vinterberg. Its big and crackling cast also includes John Hurt as Claire and Justine’s irresponsible reprobate dad (who addresses all women as “Betty”), veteran Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård (Alexander’s real-life father) as the ruthless P.R.-agency boss who’s trying to get her to churn out a slogan on her wedding night, and Udo Kier as a queeny, resentful wedding planner who refuses, as his outrage mounts, even to look at Justine. It’s a lot of fun — not a concept often associated with von Trier’s work — even as the mutual hostility starts to come boiling through the glossy surface like hot magma. Best of all is ’70s art-film goddess Charlotte Rampling as Claire and Justine’s terrifying mother, who serves as a sort of wrathful voice of God. Weddings are stupid and love is not forever, she snaps at Justine: “Enjoy it while it lasts.” When Justine tries to confide in Mom that she feels frightened, the latter replies, “We all are, sweetie. Just get on with it.”

Von Trier has repeatedly said that this is “not so much a film about the end of the world as a film about a state of mind,” and clearly that’s true. Still, he wants us to know what will happen in “Claire,” the final section of the film, before we get there, and we learn the ultimate fate of the Earth in a brief, haunting montage of extraordinary images — set, in fact, to the “Tristan” overture — before we even get to the wedding scenes. His first shot is a stunner, a close-up of Dunst’s face looking as stricken and depressed as a beautiful face can, with birds falling from the sky all around her. Here’s what von Trier had to say about revealing his own ending, which I plan to clip and resend to every reader who ever writes to accuse me of violating spoiler protocol: “Sometimes we see a film to find out how it ends, and I object to that. Do we go to a James Bond film and think there’s a chance he may not survive? You can know what happens and still not know how it happens, or still hope that you are mistaken and that it might not happen, and that is interesting to me.”

“Claire” is apparently set some weeks after the wedding implosion, and the cast of characters is stripped down to the two sisters, Claire’s husband, John, (Sutherland) and their son, Leo, who is 7 or so. Justine has turned up back on Claire and John’s doorstep, so depressed she can barely speak or walk. Gainsbourg told me in a recent interview that when von Trier’s wife saw the scene in which Claire tries (and fails) to get Justine into the bathtub, she was reminded of her own attempts to deal with the director’s depressive illness. Ultimately, Justine’s depression will become a peculiar source of strength, as this small family unit follow Rampling’s advice and just get on with it, which means preparing however they can for the possibility or likelihood that that expanding blue ball in the sky — von Trier’s visual effects team has done some amazing work here — will bring with it the end of life on Earth. Indeed, Justine declares that there is no other life in the universe, and she thinks that’s a good thing: “The Earth is evil. No one will grieve for it.”

That moment upset me profoundly the first time I saw it; I was immediately in Claire’s corner, asking, “But where will Leo grow up?” On second viewing, this thought experiment on von Trier’s part strikes me as a theological argument, and perhaps even as a way of reintroducing God, in covert and obscure form, into a godless universe. When I suggested this to him in our interview last year, he didn’t disagree, and as a friend of mine observed after a recent screening, “Melancholia” has an almost religious intensity in its latter stages. Faced with the ultimate irrelevance of all the conventions and rituals she values, Claire moves from being Justine’s caretaker into total panic and despair, while it’s Justine who pulls herself out of her personal pit of gloom long enough to gather her sister and nephew to her, in a loving embrace, at the very end. Indeed, Justine seems to view Melancholia as a friend or kindred spirit or lover; in one breathtaking scene, she reclines naked on a riverbank at night, luxuriating in the double light of our own Moon and the new planetary visitor, looking like an extraterrestrial Rhine Maiden. “Claire” is harder to watch because we know how it’s going to end, but then, we know how our lives will end and that doesn’t stop us from wanting to live them.

The end of “Melancholia” is both gorgeous and terrifying, but von Trier is right that it’s not a movie about the end of the world. It might be expressing the fact that sometimes we all feel as if we wish the world would end — and it delights in going much further than Hollywood disaster movies ever dare to — but that’s a different matter. It’s about facing life and death and mental illness with as much courage and love as you can muster, and recognizing that it isn’t always enough. I’m not sure which aspect of “Melancholia” makes von Trier most uncomfortable, the grand and gorgeous romanticism or the bitter, tender realism. Either way, this is a better movie than I ever suspected this brilliant but admittedly damaged and self-indulgent director would make, and I suspect he may feel the same way.

“Melancholia” opens this week in New York and Los Angeles, with wider national release to follow.

I’ll publish a full review of “Melancholia” later this week, but let’s add one more opposition, the one between Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg, as a pair of sisters whose mutual orbit seems almost as powerful and destructive as the one between Earth and Melancholia. To some extent both actresses are playing against type: Dunst, the beautiful Hollywood blonde, plays Justine, whose wedding comes unglued in the first half of the film, plunging her into a deep, dark depressive illness. Gainsbourg, the dark-haired Anglo-French androgyne known for her work in European art films (and also for her intermittent career as a singer-songwriter), plays Claire, the more conventional sister. A rich man’s wife — her permanently pissed-off American husband is played by Kiefer Sutherland, TV’s Jack Bauer — Claire seeks calm, order and continuity in all things, and completely panics when it becomes clear that the big planet closing in on Earth will render all her plans irrelevant.

It’s Dunst who has the showier and more heroic role. She displays a depth and commitment her previous films have only hinted at, and she clearly deserved the best-actress award she won at Cannes this year. But on seeing “Melancholia” a second time, I was struck by the tremendous courage Gainsbourg brings to the more timid, less obviously sympathetic character of Claire. Trying to keep your family together in the face of imminent planetary destruction is a task doomed to failure, of course. As Gainsbourg herself says, it’s perhaps a pathetic one. But it’s the sort of thing we all do, day after day — we keep on cooking dinner for our families and doing the laundry even as the darkness closes in.

Gainsbourg herself won exactly the same award at Cannes two years ago, for “Antichrist,” von Trier’s previous film. As she explains it, in that violent, divisive, crazier-than-any-loon psychodrama she was essentially playing a version of the Danish director (who has been public about his struggle with mental illness), and this time around Dunst got that assignment. You might expect that the daughter of European pop-culture royalty — her father was legendary French singer Serge Gainsbourg, and her mother is English actress Jane Birkin — might appear chilly or pretentious, but in two meetings I’ve found Gainsbourg a friendly, natural conversationalist. The first time I interviewed her we literally sat on the rug in her hotel room and drank tea. This meeting was a bit more formal in tone, maybe because she had just come from a photo shoot and was wearing a spectacular red gown and high heels. We sat on a white sofa and talked “Melancholia,” the end of the world, and von Trier’s infamous Hitler meltdown at Cannes.

You know, I’ve had a difficult time describing this film to people. I mean, it’s about a wedding and it’s about a planet destroying the Earth, and beyond that I don’t quite know what to say.

It’s difficult to sum it up. I’ve never had to try! I get that Lars’ films are all so personal. Reading the script, I really didn’t know where he was going, or what was behind it. You always want to know what lies behind the thoughts, or how he came up with the story, and Lars never answers any of your questions. So everybody sees what they want and analyzes it in a different way. I’ve never had to go through any analysis for myself. Just having to play the part is enough — you don’t have to understand everything. For “Antichrist” it was the same. I had many questions that were unanswered, but still I could play it.

Your character here is so different from the woman you play in “Antichrist.”

Yeah, completely different. I really had the impression, and maybe it’s trying to simplify it too much, that in “Antichrist” I was playing Lars and Willem [Dafoe] was playing the nurse. In this film, Kirsten is playing Lars and I’m playing the nurse. I really saw it that way.

Do you know, when Lars’ wife saw the film, she said that the scene that touched her the most was the scene in the bathroom, when I’m trying to pick Kirsten up and give her a bath. Because she saw herself and Lars in that moment.

So I think his films are really personal. He’s giving the parts to women, but there’s a lot of himself in there.

If you want to put it in psychoanalytic terms, he’s extracting feminine aspects of himself, and projecting them onto the screen.

Oh, really, very, very much. The fact that he could relate to Kirsten, with her depression, that whole side of her character, that’s very important.

This is a bit of a cliché, maybe, but the two of you are playing against type to some degree. Kirsten is blond and fair and basically a Hollywood star, and she’s playing the depressed one. You’re dark and European and artsy, and you’re playing the conventional one.

Yeah, that’s true. My character — she’s not facing reality. She’s very human in a way, panicking and not being able to cope with that disaster. But for the first time, I wasn’t proud of my character. I wasn’t proud of her weaknesses. She can’t face anything, and she’s such a failure! [Laughter.] Even as a mother, as a wife — every aspect of her is so, I mean, sad is not the way to put it. So much the opposite of a heroic character.

I don’t really see her that way. Well, at the end, yeah. Do you mean that in the first half of the film, when Claire is in charge of the wedding, she’s not facing the fact that her sister is really sick, and doesn’t actually want to marry this guy?

Yeah. Now, she does say that Justine was the one who wanted to get married. I didn’t push her to get married. But as soon as that’s what she says she wants, it’s as if Claire has a contract in hand. I think she needs to reassure herself with principles, with things you have to do. She goes through her days like that. For me, it’s like she’s pretending to be a mother, pretending to be a wife, pretending to take care of the house. Nothing’s really truthful. That’s the way I find it, but I don’t think Lars had this vision of my character being so cold and, um — antipathique?

Right, yeah. Unsympathetic or unpleasant.

That was what I felt. I didn’t like myself. It was interesting — not to fight against the character, because I really was her and I felt for her. But I felt ashamed. In those scenes where the end is close and I start crying — the whole thing is about being so naive!

Well, OK. But she wants them to all be together at the end of the world! It’s the most incredibly romantic thing you can imagine.

I know! But it’s pathetic!

Are you saying that if the world really were about to end, you wouldn’t care about that stuff — about facing it with your loved ones?

I don’t think I would. But I don’t know how I’d react. Maybe I’d panic even worse than she does.

The two chapters of the story are also so incredibly different. Did you shoot it in the order we see it?

No, it wasn’t shot in order. But we did start with the wedding scenes, because we had to have all the actors and we started with about 100 extras. We got into the more intimate scenes later on, but for me it was a big, big change because I still had the shoot for “Antichrist” in my head. To go from something so intimate, just being alone in a cabin, totally isolated, to a wedding party with hundreds of people — I didn’t know where to stand. It was very hard, a hard beginning. Also, I didn’t have Lars to myself! I had to share.

Well, I would have to assume you had some pretty large personalities on that set. Charlotte Rampling, John Hurt, Kiefer Sutherland, Stellan Skarsgård …

Everybody was really sweet. With Lars you have to be very simple, there’s no real ego going on. So, yes, that’s true, big personalities, but no crises, nobody felt they had to fight for themselves.

How does Lars manage a large group of people like that?

He doesn’t! That’s his thing. He doesn’t really talk. He lets you deal with the scene yourself, and is interested in getting what he needs. For me those scenes were the hardest, because the script doesn’t say what I’m doing while other people are talking. I had to invent whatever my character was going through. But it’s difficult, when you’re not very confident at the beginning of a shoot, to feel, OK, I’m in this scene and I’m dancing. To improvise for yourself. It was easier for me to just disappear. So it took time for me to figure out what he wanted me to do, and if he was happy or not.

I felt very paranoid, really, because he didn’t have time to deal with me or reassure me. Later on, I asked him if he wanted to fire me. I was so paranoid! Because I had had so much of him before, on “Antichrist.” Even though he said he was going through a very difficult time on that film, and didn’t know whether he would be able to cope with the shoot, still he was there and watching us. He was very present. This film got easier and easier as it went along. It got much closer to what I had already experienced with him.

One thing people may not get is that there’s a lot of comedy in the first half of this film. It’s often very funny: John Hurt and Charlotte Rampling as your impossible parents, Skarsgård trying to get Kirsten’s character to come up with a P.R. slogan on her wedding night.

Well, Lars is a funny man. He is! With that cynical taste.

Even casting you and Kiefer Sutherland as a married couple is already unexpected and funny, all by itself.

Yeah, sure. But Lars has this wonderful thing, in that he attracts everyone. We all want to shoot with him, and it’s really worth it. A lot of times I get asked if it was too difficult, if I would shoot again with him. How did I manage with such a monster! And he’s wonderful!

He’s a wonderful human being first. I really like him, not knowing a lot about him, but he’s someone that touches me very much. And also working with him — once you’ve worked with him it’s very hard to be satisfied with another way of working. There’s so much exploration, nothing is established. You explore the scenes, you never do the same thing again, continuity is no matter. When you go back to a more classical way of shooting, it seems weird.

Does he do any kind of rehearsal?

No, not at all. He shoots the rehearsal. I know that other actors love that thing of just jumping in, and I always felt it was very intimidating. Not to know what you’re expected to do, and then having the courage to do what you want to do. And then to hear Lars say: “This was a catastrophe! This was so wrong!” But then he blames himself as well. He’s not nasty about it. He’s just being honest. You have to dive into the unknown, and I sometimes find it really hard. But that’s part of the work, to accept being that bad at the beginning, and gradually finding your way.

Even the cameraman doesn’t know what to expect, or where to go. And the light is what it is. I remember a scene where we shot at night, where we were just shooting with lamps. We shot the first take, and either I could go and do the scene close to the lamp, if I wanted to be seen, or I could do it in the dark. But I had to choose. And it’s a weird thing, having this responsibility.

But then he takes the responsibility back. He’s always so right in his way of hearing the words and the honesty that you put behind it. You won’t get away with it if you’re not honest with him, or truthful. Or trying to be truthful, anyway!

Arguably, this movie isn’t really about an unknown planet coming and destroying the Earth, but all the same, I found that literal aspect profoundly emotional and difficult to deal with.

Yeah, well, we were just playing the situation, which is the end and death and fear. With Lars, I find that it always has to do with fear. It’s strange being scared all the time. My character, after a while, is scared all the time.

In a strange way, it’s a very unselfish film. It reminded me that it is much more frightening to think about the destruction of the entire planet than just about my own death. I’m going to die one day, I’m mostly OK with that. But the world and other people will still be here.

Yeah, to think about all the nonsense of everything, all of life, being gone. That’s very weird.

I was in Cannes for Lars’ famous press conference, and I can tell you two things about my reaction. First of all, I more or less knew — or thought I knew — where he was trying to go with those remarks about Hitler and the Nazis, and then it was clear to me that he was making a joke that went badly off the rails. Secondly, there were journalists in that room who should be ashamed of themselves, because they reported the event in bad faith to make headlines. But you were on the podium right next to him, which must have been different. Did you have any idea what he was talking about while he was saying it?

No! [Laughter.] No! I’m always quite nervous at press conferences. It’s not an easy thing to do. So I was inside my bubble and not realizing what he was saying. Then suddenly the words got through a little and I said, yes, he is talking about Hitler! My God! Then I was a little bit ashamed of myself for not having reacted. You don’t know what to do in that situation, so it was quite painful.

But the thing is, I wasn’t shocked by him. You know, it was a bad joke, a very bad joke in bad taste. But he’s done other stuff with us. I remember him and Willem Dafoe getting naked before we shot, and always talking about dicks. That’s just him. I’m not saying that sex and Hitler have anything to do with one another, but he’s got a certain type of humor.

It strikes me as a teenager’s sense of humor. A desire to shock people.

Exactly. And then he got deeper in his caca. It became worse and worse and worse. But what I want to say is that he’s still my friend. It wasn’t out of character, I’d have to say that too.

He also says he wants you and Kirsten to do another film with him, which he at first said would be hardcore pornography and then said probably wouldn’t.

It is true! You never know, but he has sent me a synopsis and I really want to do it. I don’t know what it’ll be like and maybe he won’t ask me in the end. But for the moment, yeah, I’d be really happy to work with him again. The most precious thing you can get is to collaborate and continue collaborating. It doesn’t mean you get better, but when you admire someone you just want to go on. It’s as simple as that.

You know, I have to go, but I want to thank you for helping me understand the film better. I can tell it’s not that easy to talk about.

I feel very comfortable talking about Lars’ way of working, but not what the film means. Also, I don’t have a clear point of view, having played in it. I don’t have the distance that I’d like.

It’s funny how reviews come in waves. Everybody who saw it at Cannes pretty much loved it, and then after the New York Film Festival I read a couple of reviews that said it was too dark or nihilistic. Everybody’s going to have their own reaction, of course, but that’s such a limited way of looking at it.

Yeah. You know, Lars is saying that it’s the most optimistic film he’s ever made.

I think I agree with him, even though I don’t really know what he means!

I don’t know what he means either. I sort of get a glimpse of something, yes. But I couldn’t explain it.

It’s so spectacular. It’s hard to be depressed by that.

Maybe it’s just the beauty of it, yeah. That might be it.

“Melancholia” opens this week in New York and Los Angeles, with wider national release to follow.