KIRSTEN DUNST AT LAST NIGHT'S MELANCHOLIA PREMIERE. PHOTO COURTESY OF DAVE ALLOCCA/STARPIX
Last night, just after the Earth exploded, a gaggle of celebrities and cinephiles gathered at the Time Warner Center's Stone Rose Lounge. They were in remarkably good spirits, considering what had just happened (onscreen, anyway): the collision of Earth with the heretofore unknown planet Melancholia, which emerges from its hiding place behind the sun to follow a course straight for our world.
Don't worry, that's not a spoiler: it happens in the first few minutes of Lars Von Trier's Melancholia, which spends the rest of its running time examining the events for one family leading up to the collision. Justine (Kirsten Dunst) marries Michael (Alexander Skarsgard) and has a lavish reception at the sumptuous home owned by her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and husband John (Kiefer Sutherland). As the party drags on, though, it soon becomes apparent that it's not such a happy occasion: Justine, depressed, keeps finding excuses to leave; Michael is disappointed; Claire is anxious; John is upset at having spent so much money on a celebration that's turned out to be a bust. In the days following, these relationships are strained further, as Melancholia approaches Earth and no one's sure whether it will hit.
At the Peggy Siegal Company party for the premiere, presented by DeLéon Tequila as part of the New York Film Festival, we seized the chance to talk to a few of the film's stars—starting with Skarsgård (we're proven fans). His Michael is a basically good man in love with a very difficult woman; we're led to believe Justine's moodiness is nothing new. "He wants—he believes—that he can change her. I think she's always been like the fragile, wounded bird to Michael," Skarsgård said. "It's not like everything was great and then she started going crazy this night. I think that's been there, under the surface, since they met."
Skarsgård's father, Stellan, also appears in the film, as Justine's slimy boss—and Michael's best man. "It says a lot about Michael as a character, the fact that this douchebag, her boss, played by my old man—the fact that Michael will choose this guy as his best man to help his wife," Skarsgård noted. "He's like, ‘Oh, that'd be good for you, in your career if I do this'—it's a very unselfish act, and he's willing to do that."
Dunst rises ably to the challenge of playing an unlikable character. "I have to say, when you have to go to dark places, it's the best when you're in the best head space. You have perspective on things," she said.
"At the end of the day, I was tired, but also, as an actress, that's my job," Dunst continued, reasonably. "It feels good at the end of the day, when you've exhausted yourself in a way that you feel attributes something to what can be a great film. It's satisfying as an actress."
Gainsbourg's Claire, too, is a less-than-stellar model of adulthood. "I didn't find any strength [in her]!" Gainsbourg, wearing a remarkable pair of sequined trousers, said with a soft laugh. "I didn't want to relate to her cowardliness. And at the same time, that's what makes her human, and so I loved that about her." She also revealed a bit about Von Trier's process: "The way that I prepared was, I remembered Lars was asking me to see Persona, the Bergman film, with that relationship between patient and nurse. And that's the way we worked with Kirsten."
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