Feature by Peter Fraser
For large swathes of his delirious film Europa, and other formal hat tricks, I’m willing to forgive Lars Von Trier quite a lot, which is good because one rather senses that there’s a lot to forgive. If every work of art bears more than a whiff of crime and every great work positively reeks, then Von Trier’s unashamedly magpie tendencies may indeed be a sign of his significant artistic stature.
What is the old phrase? ‘Talent borrows and genius steals.’ I have a genuine affection for those who delight in mischief, who seek controversy for its own sake, and while I don’t believe it’s sufficient to prove a filmmaker’s worth neither do I find it easy to believe that something truly exceptional can be created without even a hint of impropriety. After all, the greatest films seek to push things forward – wherever ‘forward’ may be (and it’s a sign of their importance that few others apart from the artist, or even the artist themselves, could have anticipated it) – and one cannot subvert, expropriate or upend traditions without shocking a few vested interests. It seems to me that a filmmaker’s motivations are always dubious, always slippery, and that a puckish desire to denounce the Emperor’s new clothes is as valid as any other, given the presence of talent or, dare we whisper that much abused epithet, genius.
Lars Von Trier may believe that he’s a genius, I’m not sure. He certainly acts that way - not in person perhaps but certainly in the presumption of his films – and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, so long as he doesn’t believe himself infallible and so long as it pushes him to disdain mediocrity. After all, if he doesn’t believe it then who will? Certainly not me, not yet, but not because I dislike his films.
One of the most interesting, insoluble questions for me when I consider Von Trier is deciding quite how much I do like his films. I’m never sure. Large parts of Europa and The Idiots I love and in every Von Trier film there are moments that rank with the most memorable cinema sequences that I’ve seen.
M’Lud, in defence of the accused I cite the rape scene in Dogville. In the film Nicole Kidman plays Grace who arrives in Dogville seeking refuge but is enslaved by its inhabitants. For all my reservations about the thinness of the characters and the contrivances of their behaviour, perhaps partly excused by the purposefully unnatural environs in which the film takes place, I’m willing to forgive it all. That’s because the form, ‘fusion’ as Von Trier calls it (by his lights combining film, theatre and literature), is worth it. Nowhere is this better exemplified than the transparent walls that allow us to see the most hypocritical misdeeds of the town as it goes about its ‘innocuous’ daily business. So in a long shot we see people talking in the street, someone knitting in her house, and in the very background, right at the very corner of the frame, we can see Grace being assaulted. Were the staging naturalistic with walls, and doors, and all the paraphernalia of an ordinary town, then this shot wouldn’t be possible and we wouldn’t have such a powerful visual symbol of a community’s bad faith and its complicity in terrible acts.
Here’s another more poetic example: in Dogville there’s a wonderful moment when Grace is speaking to Jack McKay, who is pretending not to be blind. He continues his charade as he and Grace stand at a window in a room without walls, in the vast darkness of the hanger-like space. Miraculously the delicate glow of a sunset haunts their faces and it’s an exquisite moment because it looks so lovely, because it’s so obviously artificial yet evocative of the real thing, and because we know that Jack can’t see it.
Such moments of formal bravado stretch the medium and celebrate its possibilities. Von Trier has said that he’s an optimist. He believes that the medium is in its infancy and has a long way to go. I hope he’s right. I imagine Von Trier like the central character of Europa running to defuse a bomb in front of a back-projection of a ticking clock, but in my version he stops, thinks, winks, and then reaches up and shifts the clock hands. Crisis averted he heads off to cause another, just so he can escape in an unconventional way.
|
