On Movies: Dunst's prize part in 'Melancholia'

TORONTO - Kirsten Dunst has a confession to make. When Lars Von Trier contacted her - first by e-mail, then by Skype - about a part in his new film, Melancholia, she said yes, immediately.

"But it was funny," Dunst recalls, "because when Lars offered me the movie, I wasn't completely sure which character he wanted me to play. There are two girls. And I was like, 'I'd love to do it! I'd love to do it!'

"And I remember getting off the phone and thinking which one? Who am I? Justine or Claire?"

Von Trier, it turns out, had Dunst in mind for Justine - a bride who shows up late for her own wedding reception, and who wanders through the swank and cavernous halls of her family's mansion - a castle, really - in a state of benumbed calm. (Charlotte Gainsbourg, star of Von Trier's jolting Antichrist, is the other sister, Claire.)

Von Trier, the controversial Danish director who got booted out of the Cannes Film Festival in May for his awkward news-conference ramblings about Jews and Nazis (more on that in a minute), pitched Melancholia as "a beautiful movie about the end of the world."

And, indeed, as various family and friends gather for the ceremony, a new planet appears in the sky - looming closer and closer to Earth. Cataclysm is on its way.

But the film, too, is this big, romantic visual symphony (Wagner's Tristan und Isolde is all over the soundtrack), a sweeping, wide-screen meditation on depression. Dunst's Justine is deep in her own dark world.

"Someone said to me that Justine is really like Lux grown up," says Dunst, referring to the shell-shocked teen she played in Sofia Coppola's 1999 debut, The Virgin Suicides. "Justine is like a continuation - she's what happened to Lux."

Melancholia, which also stars John Hurt, Charlotte Rampling, Alexander Skarsgård, and Kiefer Sutherland and which opens Friday at the Ritz at the Bourse, won Dunst the best-actress prize at Cannes Film Festival. It's an astounding performance - Dunst is living this woman whole.

Von Trier, in an interview on the Melancholia website, says, "I think she's one hell of an actress. She is much more nuanced than I thought, and she has the advantage of having had a depression of her own."

Which is a matter of tabloid record - Dunst checking herself into a Utah treatment center in 2008. The actress, who doesn't like to talk about her "process," does acknowledge that one of the reasons she wanted to do Melancholia is that "you could really put your own inner life into this film."