Melancholia: a wedding, a funeral and the apocalypse

DIRECTOR Lars von Trier may have been declared persona non grata at this year’s Cannes film festival after saying he understood Hitler, but as "the law of cussedness" would have it, he also directed the festival's best film, says Nigel Andrews of the Financial Times.

"Forget the Golden Palm-winning The Tree of Life,” says Andrews. "Melancholia is so stupendous, imaginative, weird and outlandish that it rearranges the contents of your soul."
 
Variety's Peter Debruge is similarly impressed, praising the way von Trier extracts "incredibly strong performances from his cast while serving up a sturdy blend of fly-on-the-wall naturalism and jaw-dropping visual effects".
 
Part sci-fi horror movie, part social satire, Melancholia sees von Trier explore his favourite theme of personal implosion, but this time on the grandest of scales - cosmic catastrophe. Earth is on a collision course with another planet.
 
The film begins with the end of the world - and von Trier's version of the apocalypse occurs as a series of beautiful and surreal images, set to Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. Kirsten Dunst's wayward bride Justine floats Ophelia-like in a pond while her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) sinks into a pristine golf green as the eponymous Melancholia threatens to engulf Earth. "While disorienting, the sequence certainly gets us thinking in grand, cosmic terms." says Debruge.
 
Visual pageantry then gives way to von Trier's stock-in-trade - handheld filming - as Melancholia cuts to Justine's opulent yet doomed wedding. Von Trier's impressive cast play out a Festen-style nearest-and-dearest disaster, notes the Daily Telegraph's Sukhdev Sandhu: "Justine's parents (John Hurt, obsessed with women called Betty, and a deliciously citric Charlotte Rampling) don't get on; her arrogant boss (Stellan Skarsgard) is trying to conduct business; she herself, when she's not crying or holding up proceedings by taking leisurely baths, has sex with a stranger on the estate's golf course."
 
Split into two sections, the film contrasts the pair of siblings - Dunst's depressive Justine, for whom the apocalypse is a welcome relief, and her bourgeois sister Claire who, despite seeming more rational and calm, descends into maniacal despair as the end of the world approaches.
 
Dunst's performance has been widely hailed as a career-defining turn - she won best actress at Cannes in spite of von Trier's controversial comments about the Nazis. Sandhu calls her "exceptional" and "utterly convincing".
 
For the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, however, it is Gainsbourg - cast as the straight woman after the horrors of Antichrist - who gives a far more interesting performance. Dunst's descent into a glassy-eyed depression is "forceful and very sincere", he says, but argues that it is impossible not to remember that the "Meg-Ryan-on-Parky look" is something von Trier has elicited from his other stars such as Bjork and Nicole Kidman.
 
Describing himself as a "longtime von Trier doubter" Bradshaw admits that the film has grown on him. "There's a mawkish fascination and some flashes of real visual brilliance," he says.

But one critic who remains unconvinced is Time Out's Dave Calhoun. While technically impressive, overall the film feels "under-developed, uninteresting and underwhelming", he argues. "The best of Melancholia would make a great photography exhibition. The rest is best forgotten."
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