Så vær vel beredt på at tage det gode med det onde
No cinema visits this week. Maybe next week. The Lars Von Trier season continues. For nostalgia freaks out there, I watched both Breaking the Waves (1996) last week and The Idiots (1998) this week on video. Yes, actual VHS tapes. Since the image quality of these films isn’t that fantastic anyway, it didn’t really make much difference.
Riget II (1997)
Also following Twin Peaks, the second season of The Kingdom doesn’t match up to the first. There’s an unwillingness to play the horror straight any longer, and the show becomes too wacky for its own good. No wonder nobody was willing to back a third series and complete the story. This also mirrors Twin Peaks, which abandoned viewers in the Black Lodge with the notorious David Lynch directed episode 22 of season 2 (which may be, incidentally, one of the finest hours of television ever made).
The Idiots (1998)
Lars Von Trier likes to operate as a director on a film with a number of self-imposed rules. (This is played out to a greater extent in a film called The Five Obstructions (2003), which I have not yet seen.) The perhaps inevitable result of this series of rules was the Dogme Manifesto in 1995, which should be easy enough to find online if you’re interested. Tartan were nice enough to reprint it in full inside my copy of the VHS. The Dogme Manifesto generated an enormous amount of publicity and actually inspired a number of filmmakers worldwide to take up the gauntlet and give it a go. The first Dogme movie was Festen (1998) and The Idiots was the second. The Manifesto appeared just as CGI was on its first big upswing in the wake of Jurassic Park (1993), and the Manifesto called for a back to basics approach to filmmaking which cast aside all trickery and artificiality. Which is ironic because of course The Idiots is a highly tricksy and artifical movie, for all its claims to a lack of artifice. The film itself is at once both clumsy and obvious and fascinating and intense. Pretending to be retarded to highlight the hypocrisy of suburban bourgeois existence seems way too much like an idiotic adolescent prank (which may be the point). Cloaking your film in documentary realism (including interviews with the cast conducted in character by the director himself) doesn’t hide the very old-fashioned feel of the subject. There’s something very 60s about the commune set up by the idiots, and something very 70s about the way it all falls apart at the end.
Dancer in the Dark (2000)
I don’t think you can trust a film buff who doesn’t like musicals. There’s singing, there’s dancing, there’s the two together in endless combinations, there’s music, there’s song, it’s all good. Musicals themselves however, at least in the West (nothing can stop Bollywood), hit something of a crisis point at the end of the 1960s. Chasing the success of The Sound of Music (1965), all of the major Hollywood studios embarked on a series of costly musicals, all of which tanked at the box office. For some years, even though musical was a dirty word, this didn’t stop musicals being made, and the more interesting ones all come from a similar place. They transform into self-reflexive meta-musicals; they are musicals about the possibility or not of making a musical in the modern world; they are films like All That Jazz (1979), One from the Heart (1982) and even Chicago (2002). Dancer in the Dark fits squarely in this tradition. Not only does it have the characters preparing an amateur stage production of The Sound of Music, it has a clip from 42nd Street (1933), and all of the musical numbers are filmed with 100 video cameras (an imposed Lars Von Trier rule, though he admits in the making of that he really needed 1000). The plot is one of blatant manipulation, and I guess it’s inevitable that this manipulation was also used by Von Trier to get Björk and the rest of the cast to the places they needed to reach. This was particularly hard on Björk, who’d only acted in music videos before this film and was accustomed to being in total creative control of all that she did.
Cold Mountain (2003)
I hated The English Patient (1996). It was a film that should have made you want to run off to the desert and have a mad, passionate affair with a mysterious stranger. Instead, you couldn’t wait to get out of the cinema. I’ve always felt that Anthony Minghella works much better in the crime genre. The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) fitted him perfectly, a delightful throwback to the three episodes of Inspector Morse he wrote in the 1980s. It was with some trepidation then that I went to see Cold Mountain, which is a pretty good movie (I certainly liked it enough to buy it on DVD) and in any other year it might have won more than one Oscar. But the 2004 Oscar ceremony was the year of the hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) was a better film than anything else released in 2003.