Saturday, 12 November 2022 / 11 am / Čas Cinema

Melancholia
(d. Lars von Trier, Denmark, Sweden, France, Germany 2011, 135 min., 12+, in English with Czech subtitles)

Lars von Trier may not have fulfilled his dream of staging any of the works of German composer Richard Wagner, but he chose the prelude from Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde as the main musical theme of his Melancholia. The second film in his “trilogy of depression,” it tells the story of two sisters (Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg) during the younger sister’s wedding at an old rural manor. The celebratory mood is ruined, however, by a sudden threat in the form of the red planet Melancholia, which emerges from behind the sun.

Von Trier’s psycho­logical catastrophe film is a caustic antithesis to Hollywood blockbusters about the end of the world. Kirsten Dunst’s performance earned her an award at Cannes, where von Trier’s inappro­priate remarks at a press conference made him “persona non grata” for the subsequent seven years.

Lars von Trier (1956)

An original phenomenon among film directors, von Trier graduated from the National Film School of Denmark in 1983. After graduation, he worked on commercials before garnering attention with his debut, The Element of Crime (1984). There followed the dramas Epidemic (1987) and Europa (1991, Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival), The Idiots (1998, shot in the spirit of the Dogme 95 manifesto), the melodrama Breaking the Waves (1996, Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival), and the antimusical Dancer in the Dark (2000, Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival). Other works from this extensive filmography include Dogville (2003), Manderlay (2005), Antichrist (2009), Melancholia (2011), Nymphomaniac, Vols. I and II (2013), and The House That Jack Built (2018). He has also experimented with the television medium (Medea, 1988, and the outstanding miniseries The Kingdom, 1994, 1997, and 2022). Von Trier is a co-founder of the Zentropa production company.