An earthquake and hurricane hit New York in the same week. An October snowstorm. And nutty Danish provocateur Lars von Trier — long one of the most annoying filmmakers on the planet — turns out one of the year’s most emotionally resonant art movies.
I never thought I’d write those last words, much less report that Kirsten Dunst, never a great actress in my humble opinion, gives one of 2011’s most affecting performances.
For all I know, their lyrically beautiful film, “Melancholia,” is more accurately predicting the end of the world than Harold Camping.
Von Trier’s blackly comic cross between “Rachel Getting Married” and the waiting-for-the-apocalypse “On the Beach’’ is the accidental evil twin of another instant art-house classic that premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
Where “The Tree of Life” depicted the birth of the Earth and the rise of the dinosaurs, von Trier’s film opens with birds falling from the sky; Dunst, in a bridal dress, gazing vacantly into the camera; a horse tumbling to the ground; and, finally, and more spectacularly, the Earth literally disintegrates after a collision with another planet — all accompanied by a Wagnerian overture. The ultimate movie spoiler of 2011 is followed by several weeks of flashbacks.
Dunst brilliantly plays Justine, an advertising copywriter who’s about to wed a totally unwitting young hunk (Alexander Skarsgard of TV’s “True Blood”) at a remote castle with an 18-hole golf course rented for the occasion by her arrogant millionaire brother-in-law (Kiefer Sutherland).
Family tensions soon surface between Justine — who (like von Trier and Dunst in real life) suffers from clinical depression and begins holding up the proceedings — and her more grounded sister Claire (French star Charlotte Gainsbourg).
There’s also squabbling between her long-estranged parents, a whimsical alcoholic (John Hurt) who holds Justine at arm’s length and an acerbic Charlotte Rampling.
Before the evening is out, Justine is married, insults her pompous boss (Alexander’s real-life father, Stellan) — and demolishes her new marriage by having sex in a fountain with a male wedding guest.
The errant planet (called Melancholia, which also refers to Justine’s condition) becomes the focus in the second part. The now-separated Justine has joined her husband’s family (there’s also a young son) at their country estate to await the end as Melancholia looms ever-larger in the sky.
Actually, Justine is serenely holding things together better than they are.
The fatuous brother-in-law (Sutherland is dryly hilarious) is offering repeated assurances that the other planet will miss just hitting Earth, but no one believes this — especially his increasingly frantic wife.
The performances are terrific, but it’s worth the admission price just to see the stunning special effects at the end, which are so good that the director complained in Cannes his film comes “perilously close to the aesthetic of American mainstream films.”
This isn’t true by a longshot, even if such von Trier touches as Dunst’s graphic nudity and a horse-whipping sequence are relatively tasteful by the filmmaker’s envelope-pushing standards.
I loathed all of von Trier’s most recent films — “Antichrist,’’ “Manderlay,’’ “Dogville” and “Dancer in the Dark.” And there’s certainly no defending his sick sense of humor, which got him officially labeled “persona non grata” at the Cannes festival after he identified himself as a Nazi.
So it’s not casual praise when I say that “Melancholia’’ is just as essential for serious filmgoers this year as “The Tree of Life.’’