Joyce Glasser reviews ENDURING PROVOCATIONS: THE FILMS OF LARS VON TRIER (August/September 2023 and The Curzon Collection (boxset) to order online
Hard to believe that the bad boy of Danish cinema, controversial for many of right (his unique, disturbing and incendiary films) and wrong (his comments on Nazis, alleged treatment of actresses and on-screen killing of an animal) reasons, is 67 and dealing with a diagnosis of Parkinsons’ Disease. Curzon Cinemas is honouring von Trier with a selected retrospective. Many of the films have remastered prints and will be playing in selected Curzon cinemas throughout the United Kingdom until mid-September. And if you have missed any you can purchase a generous box set that covers the filmmaker’s career.
Von Trier was making technically precise and more conventional films, many award winning, for ten years before he and Thomas Vinterberg created their influential Dogme 95 Manifesto. The movement was a reaction to high budget American films (with which they could never compete), sensationalist plots, built sets, post-dubbed music, computer graphics and most of all, the elaborate special effects and technology that were beginning to dominate filmmaking in the 1990s.
The Curzon’s big-screen retrospective included von Trier’s first film under Dogme 95, and his masterpiece, Breaking the Waves. Breaking the Waves did not, however, adhere to all of the Dogme 95 rules, although it catapulted the British actress Emily Watson to stardom (she was nominated for an Oscar) and made von Trier’s name.
The film that adheres to the Dogme 95 rules (and arguably the only one) is The Idiots which is screening from 18 August in selected Curzon cinemas. It was one of the earliest instances of a digital film, and von Trier was writer, director and cinematographer using just a hand-held camera. The Idiots is from 1998, the same year as his friend Vinterberg’s controversial Dogme 95 film Celebration.
If you compare Celebration with Vinterberg’s 2020 Academy Award winning Another Round, you can appreciate how limited and limiting Dogme 95 was. Both films, however, are provocative, and while that word is not in the Manifesto, Curzon have highlighted the current that runs through the work of these Danish independents.
The Idiots proved so controversial, that it was met with boos and walk-outs wherever it was shown, even at the Cannes Film Festival. Because the simple plot revolves around a group of educated, middle-class, thirty-somethings who think it’s amusing to shock the bourgeoisie by “playing” physically and mentally ill people, it’s a film that could never be made today and appalled audiences in 1998.
We are not privy to how this strange group formed or for how long it has been carrying out its idiocies to allegedly “let out [their] inner idiots”, but we do know their communal home belongs to group leader Stoffer’s (Jens Albinus) uncle. The trusting uncle has allowed Stoffer to live there while selling the house. A house stripped of furniture for a sale fits in perfectly with Dogme’s rule against elaborate sets.
When a promising couple approach Stoffer to purchase the house, they are warned about a mental hospital down the road and told how certain patients wander over to the house (one of whom is present to underscore the point). The couple do not come across as “not in my back yard” hypocrites, but when the district council receive complaints about naked and rowdy people running through the quiet streets, they suggest Stoffer could get a grant for agreeing to transfer his home for the “handicapped” to another area, Hvidore.
The group create increasingly daring skits to amuse themselves. In one tense situation, the elected carer, Stoffer, leaves the elected “spaz” (the Danish term is spass for “spassing”), Jeppe (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), with a group of tattooed bikers at a pub. Jeppe is in character as an adult with the age of a five-year-old, attracted to tattoos. When Stoffer intentionally leaves Jeppe with the group to go to a cash machine, Jeppe pretends that he has to urinate, but cannot, obliging one of the baffled bikers to assist him. Jeppe has to subdue laughter while fearing for his life.
If the group are doing these stunts to evoke a reaction from the outside world, they are disappointed, as they are met with kindness and tolerance. The first scene, which introduces the key character of Karen (Bodile Jorgensen), is a case in point. Karen enters a restaurant where she tells the waiter she is alone, and then, that she cannot afford a main course. Without flinching he takes her order and makes her feel welcome. Susanne (Anne Louise Hassing), the elected carer that day, is taking a group of mentally challenged adults to lunch and they are also made welcome, although they abuse the hospitality and rush out without having paid the bill.
Karen, for a reason we will not know until the powerful ending, follows the group and begins to live with them, although she disapproves of their acts and morality.
What are all these people doing together in a group that is so committed that when Stoffer suggests a gangbang, only Karen refuses to take part? It seems they are escaping their conventional lives and want to shed their responsibilities and the norms of society to feel free. And yet they are unable to break the ties completely.
Coincidentally, this seems to be the raison d’être for the group of schoolteachers in Vinterberg’s Another Round. In that film, a group of middle-aged friends all caught in a rut of their own making, experiment with staying just drunk enough to bring out the best in them, and their classes and relationships improve. As in The Idiots, however, the experiment fails when their drinking becomes counterproductive.
In The Idiots when Stoffer challenges each member to “spass” in front of their family or place of work, only Karen is willing to risk all. The others are shown to be hypocrites themselves, especially Axel (Knud Romer Jorgensen) who is too cowardly to leave his family for Katrine (Anne-Grethe Bjarup Riis) and is furious when the group crash a business meeting.
Like it or loathe it, The Idiots will not leave you indifferent. Von Trier went on to make provocative and thought-provoking films that stretch genres, but are always unsettling: Dogville, Antichrist, Melancholia and Nymphomania among others. These are all in the boxset, and Melancholia is in Curzon cinemas from September 1st.
