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My Melancholy is the most faithful mistress I have known, what wonder then, that I love her in return.
Melancholia … behaves like an open wound.
Melancholia … I see it more as a film about a state of mind … than a disaster film.
The cruel beauty of Lars von Trier's stunning prelude to Melancholia — a montage of 16 singular images — transfixes us in an aesthetic moment, quietly waiting until its dark art is felt. Flooding our senses with a visual explosion of sorrowful, voluptuous, intoxicating imagery — infused by the haunting woodwinds and strings of Wagner's Prelude to Tristan und Isolde — the double life of melancholia lives again.
Melancholy's alchemical power of transforming bile into the dark ink of Baudelaire's poetry of longing penetrates the screen and us . The first image we see is the face of Justine (Kirsten Dunst) — eyes shut, stringy dank hair, her face a death mask, violent in its paralysis and despair. Eyes opening, Justine's lost gaze accompanies us as dead birds rain from the sky. Following are 15 phantasmatic images — each, like a dream, abandons temporality and logic; each, evocative, enigmatic, lodges us in the mysterious lure of an internal world where desire, longing, and love dwell imperiled, fractured, and submerged in dark matter. Manuel Alberto Claro's