My jaw has been dropping at the vehemence of the negative reviews of Danish film writer/director Lars Von Trier's latest opus, Idioteren (The Idiots). The film certainly tramples through some cinematic taboos (a half-erect penis, a brief orgy scene, and a sustained assault on middleclass complacency), but it is a powerful and deeply unsettling critique of a Nordic apex society.
The action is mostly improvised around Von Trier's framework script, with a group of wealthy young adults taking over a house in a salubrious suburb of Copenhagen. Living on borrowed time (the house is being sold), they live a culty, communal lifestyle, getting in touch with their "inner idiot" through the outrageous practice of "spassing" - pretending to be retarded.
In their van, marked as a remedial vehicle, they visit factories, swimming pools and restaurants, shepherded by Susanne Louise Hassing), a former social worker; meanwhile, seeing off potential house-buyers with their drooling antics. It's undeniably tasteless, but there is enormous bad-minded humour in the way it skewers the squeamish prejudice of "normal" society, and even more uncomfortable poignancy in the mutual bemusement of the group's encounter with some genuine, gentle, Down's syndrome people.
Von Trier also lays bare the volatile group dynamics, as the more vulnerable characters are preyed upon by the vindictive Stoffer (Jens Albinus). Curiously, it emerges as a deeply moral piece, as we are confronted with the truth behind the meek and tearful Karen (Bodil Jrgensen), who, joined by Suzanne, goes home to her emotionally stultifying family and confronts an awful personal tragedy.
It's a masterfully transgressive film, even if many Danes feel The Idiots goes too far. Interestingly, the film cuts to the quick of the left-leaning pride in Denmark's old post-Lutheran liberalism which gave the country (or Copenhagen at least) its sexual revolution, liberal drug laws, and various anarchic and alternative forms of communal self-government, such as the Thiui commune in north Jutland or, on the outskirts of Copenhagen, the controversial Christiania.
The jiggering, handheld, lowtech camerawork (mostly shot on video and transferred to 35mm film) is "in compliance" with the Dogme '95 Manifesto, signed by Von Trier and his fellow director Thomas Vinterberg - a paredback methodology of film-making involving mandatory handheld cameras, purely live sound, a ban on artificial lighting and props, and, indeed, the death of the auteur.
Vinterberg created the first Dogme film, Festen, last year: another profound microcosm of apexsociety northern Europe, told through the 60th birthday party of a wealthy industrialist and his deeply troubled family. A dizzily shot, propulsive drama, it carries many memorable shocks. (A third Dogme film, Mifune, has already garnered awards in Berlin. Directed by Sren Kragh-Jacobsen, it's about a yuppie ashamed of his rural roots and mentally retarded brother).
If all three Dogme films seem in thematic agreement, Von Trier's big breakthrough, Breaking the Waves (shot completely in English), is almost another of the genre. Despite the 35mm print, the video grain is plainly visible at times in Robby Muller's wheeling camera-work - and over 90 per cent of the film is shot in extreme handheld close-up, so the landscape whirls blurredly around the characters.
But it was the emotional and psycho-sexual punch of this film which won it the 1996 Grand Prix at Cannes, and an Oscar nomination for Emily Watson as the young child-woman Bess from the isolationist Scottish sect. In its tale of her doomed marriage to an outsider, the high-living oil-rig worker, Breaking the Waves is in one way a perversely gruelling variation of fishing tragedies, of women grieving for men lost at sea. Before Breaking the Waves, Von Trier made two TV series (the first was also edited together for cinema release) of his surreal fantasy, The Kingdom, starring the late Ernst Hugo Jaeregaard as the monstrous, incompetent Swedish neurosurgeon who joins the inner circle of consultants at Copenhagen's central hospital.
My personal favourite of Von Trier's remains Europa (1991), a romantic tragi-thriller (shot in black and white) set on a train traversing a benighted Germany, in the immediate aftermath of the second World War. Apart from other regular themes in Von Trier's work (brain surgery, idiocy, the evil or fallibility of doctors, religion/spirituality and hitech medicine), there is also the recurring notion of travelling to the mythical root of Europa, a groaning persistence of generational memories of the Holocaust and the atrocities of war.
Interestingly, Von Trier (b. 1956) was christened Lars Trier (a common Danish surname) but in film school, he opted for the more Germanic Von Trier, perhaps with some oblique reference to Trier, the German Rhineland city. There isn't even any German in his immediate ancestry, so despite Denmark's relatively good war record (with regard to its Jewish population), Von Trier's interest in war memories is a personal obsession.
After the huge success of Breaking the Waves, it's extraordinary that Von Trier veers into the inflammatory territory of The Idiots. But while his career has been showered with accolades, polite society has always grimaced at his electrifying intellectual-psychological horror films, which forever push the boundaries into a series of uncomfortable, in-your-face, moral probes. Despite his enormous successes, not one of his films could be termed in any way conventional. Interestingly, for all the bluster on the Dogme website, Von Trier's next film, Dancer in the Dark (now shooting in Sweden), is not a Dogme film. It's the opposite, a big-scale musical, composed by Bjork and starring her (as a factory-worker going blind) and Catherine Deneuve. With over 100 cameras built into the set (a la Busby Berkeley?), it is billed by Zentropa producer, Vibeke Windelov, as the third in a "melodramatic trilogy" which includes Idiots and Breaking the Waves - presumably in its focus on sympathetic child-women characters).
How far will Von Trier go this time?
The Idiots runs at the IFC until Thursday
