Christian Geisnaes

Wagner's Overture for Tristan und Isolde thunders its ominous beauty on the soundtrack, and a blond woman (Kirsten Dunst) in a bridal gown watches anxiously as birds fall dead from the sky. In a farther region of the sky, one planet, named Melancholia, approaches the Earth. On a golf-course green, a second woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg) clutches her son. A black horse collapses backward in slow motion. Now our Moon seems to have its own moon: the rogue planet nearing our planet. The blond tries running through a glade, but her feet become entangled in grasping tree roots — or, as she describes it, "woolly yarn." She raises her arms and wisps of smoke shoot from her fingers. The small planet reaches the Earth, makes impact and craters into it softly, deeply. The impact is less a collision than a celestial mating, a match made in the heavens.

Every Cannes Festival needs a Wow! moment, and the opening few minutes of Lars von Trier's Melancholia provided the artistic sensation of Cannes 2011. Even as Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, this Festival's other big event, re-created the beginning of the cosmos, so, with similarly spectacular imagery but with a greater emotional resonance, Melancholia begins with the end of the world. It's as if these two highly esteemed, blithely quirky filmmakers had been assigned the complementary subjects of ontogeny and eschatology, and responded with their grand, distilled visions.

The rest of Melancholia, like the long middle section of The Tree of Life, is devoted to the little people in this hurtling universe, the ants under a microscope. Justine (Dunst) and Claire (Gainsbourg) are sisters: the first a depressive, or in von Trier's preferred designation a melancholiac, and the second "normal" — though the view of this world-class eccentric is so skewed that he sees normality as a disease, perhaps an epidemic infecting the majority of the population.

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Within the hour, Richard Corliss will be posting his review of Lars von Trier's (in my view, excellent) new film Melancholia, which had its world premiere this morning. But von Trier, the wildly talented, supremely maddening Danish director of such Cannes favorites as Europa/Zentropa, Breaking the Waves and Antichrist, topped himself for audacity in the press conference that followed the screening. As his stars Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg looked on aghast, von Trier mused on his family's Germanic roots and, following his own tortured logic, concluded, "O.K., I'm a Nazi."

[See UPDATE below.]

Melancholia, it must be stated, has no political agenda whatsoever; it is a meditation on the end of the world and the grace or panic with which a few people face it. The director calls his film a "German romance," but that could be because it is the love-and-death saga of two sisters facing the apocalypse, and because Wagner's Tristan und Isolde swathes the soundtrack. The film was greeted with severely mixed early opinions, and von Trier seemed to be agreeing with the nay-sayers. "Maybe it's crap," he said of the movie. "Of course I hope not, but there's quite a big possibility that this might be really not worth seeing."

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