Lars von Trier, Melancholia press kit
Cette mélancolie qu’ont les femmes qui ont cherché le bonheur et qui n’ont trouvé que l’amour.
I was pushed to my limit in Melancholia, but I was willing to go there. For the last shot, with me, Kirsten, and the little boy all together, Lars said, “I want to have a bit of an experiment with you. Every morning I’d like to shoot this scene. Again. You can listen to whatever you want, do whatever you need. I don’t know what I’m looking for, but it’s the end of the world and I want to see an expression of something.” It was terrifying, because at a point, it wasn’t acting anymore. The suffering and the cruelty of the moment was horrible.
Charlotte Gainsbourg describes filming the final scene of Melancholia.
Art inspires the art of Melancholia.
The image of Justine floating down the stream with her bouquet is inspired by John Everett Millais’s 1852 painting Ophelia.
Matters about the idea of the end of the world seems to always bring to my mind the one thing that ever stayed with me when our favorite world mythologist, Joseph Campbell, once said that the end of the world should not be thought of as an event to come and referred to it as the annihilation of an old way of living in the world. “It is an event of psychological transformation, of visionary transformation. You see not the world of solid things but a world of radiance,” Campbell said.
While not as conclusive to Campbell’s interpretation, Melancholia does serve up a nice picturesque dichotomy between two opposing effects of imposing doom on the human psyche. There was a sense of weight, a sense of burden, and a sense of relief all in one fell swoop of a scene and it was magnificent.
“I’m trudging through this grey wooly yarn, it’s clinging to my legs; it’s really heavy to drag along.”
but I smile, and I smile and I smile…
