It's a story of competing and oppositional impulses, a story in two sections that's about two sisters and two planets. It's also the story of its director's internal struggle, meaning his own struggle with mental illness and his struggle with maturity. After making the most composed and beautiful and conspicuously adult film of his career, von Trier seemed to wish to thrust it away or destroy it, which was partly why he got in all that trouble last spring by saying stupid things about Hitler.
But here's the thing: Von Trier got trapped by his own nervousness and inarticulacy, and blundered into the electrified third rail of European politics. You can't make jokes about Hitler in public, and you still pretty much can't say anything about the Nazis in France, where national guilt over the occupation remains a fact of life, 65 years after the war.
But what von Trier was actually trying to talk about wasn't stupid at all, and it's directly relevant to the artistic method and themes of "Melancholia.
Furthermore, it isn't quite correct or adequate to suggest that von Trier is trying to redeem the Romantic tradition from its Nazi legacy. To use his own words, he "desired to dive headlong into the abyss of German Romanticism," good and bad.
He's embracing all of it, the Eros and the Thanatos, the sensuality and the mannered artfulness and the love of destruction, the thread that leads from Goethe and Schubert to the worst crimes of the 20th century. He's suggesting that the tendency that leads to magnificent art and poetry and the one that leads to totalitarianism and the one that leads to, say, the cheesiest grade of s music videos are all essentially the same.
