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FILM COMMENT
July/August 2003
JOURNAL: COPENHAGEN
LARS VON TRIER MAY BE DENMARK'S GREAT INNOVATOR, BUT HE DOES NOT REIGN SUPREME IN THE KINGDOM OF DOGME
by KIM FOSS
above: dogville
Self-Taught Prodigies
Not all successful Danish filmmakers follow the same well-trodden path: 30-year-old Anders Thomas Jensen, who has no formal education, is the current wunderkind of Danish cinema (Trier, now 47, hardly qualifies anymore). In true Tarantino style he served his apprenticeship working in a video store and has written or co-written a number of recent Danish films, including Open Hearts, Søren Kragh-Jacobsen's Mifune (99), Kristian Levring's The King Is Alive (00), and the latest film from Lone Scherfig, Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself. Mostly for economic reasons, Wilbur was filmed in Scotland with English actors plus a cameo by Mads Mikkelsen. As a follow-up to Scherfig's Italian for Beginners (01), Wilbur is a more somber but ultimately no less life-affirming work, highlighting the director's skill and dexterity.
Among the many women working behind the camera in Danish film, both Bier and Scherfig have nurtured the more gentle and sensitive side of Jensen's sensibility. His own directorial efforts, however, are as loud and adolescent as they come. Flickering Lights (00) and The Green Butchers (03) have proven successful at the box office, and to a lesser extent among the cautious critical community but have had a hard time breaking into the international festival circuit. It's worth noting that Jensen was involved in three shorts before venturing into features - Ernst & the Light (96), Wolfgang (98), and Election Night (98) - all of which were nominated for Academy Awards, the third one taking the Oscar in the Live Action category.
Three years Jensen's senior, Nicolas Winding Refn also skipped film school - he had just been admitted when a producer managed to pull together the finance for his first feature, Pusher (96), and he opted to learn by doing, against the advice of almost everybody, including his father Anders, who is a director in his own right. His Scorsese-inspired but nonetheless original first film stalked the mean streets of Copenhagen, as did his more thoughtful and impressionistic follow-up Bleeder (99). His third film, Fear X (03), marked this formally gifted director's international debut. He co-wrote the subdued psychological thriller with the American writer Hubert Selby Jr., and cast John Turturro in the lead, but the film failed spectacularly - and undeservedly - at the Danish box office.
The Trier Effect
Lars von Trier claims that his only true competitor is himself and seemed strangely indifferent after leaving Cannes without any of the awards many expected to be bestowed on him. Prizes or not, Dogville confirms the courage of a director who prefers new challenges to complacency. The brains behind Dogme 95 also made the bravest and most dogmatic of the films bearing the certificate of the brethren, The Idiots. On the surface, Dogville seems to be a continuation of the melodramatics of Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark (not least in the unapologetic victimization of the female heroine). However, it's also a return to the no-safety-net risk taking of the early Dogme days. By abstaining from the use of props and locations (and eschewing naturalism for that matter), Trier's film becomes an exercise in Brechtian verfremdung. That the film got made at all in itself seems a triumph.
Trier's continued self-constraint will become a theme unto itself when The Five Obstructions - which looks likely to premiere at Venice - sees the light of day. The film will be directed by the Grand Old Man of Danish documentary, Jørgen Leth, the subject of a 15-film retrospective at New York's Scandinavia House last year. The point of departure is Leth's 1968 short The Perfect Human Being, which he will remake according to a set of rules and restrictions laid down by Trier. Five different versions are to be made, and the film will reportedly conclude with a discussion between the two directors on the merits of this kind of playful deconstruction.
''The film will evolve from one clearly bearing Jørgen Leth's fingerprints into one carrying those clearly identifiable as Lars von Trier's,'' read the production notes. This last sentence is perfectly emblematic of many a contemporary Danish film.
Kim Foss is a film critic for Denmark's Jyllands-Posten. He is also the Head of Programming for the annual NatFilm Festival, the biggest film festival in Denmark.
© 2003 Kim Foss
