Breaking the Waves (1996)

Denmark / Sweden / France / Netherlands / Norway / Iceland / Spain / UK, 159 minutes

Director: Lars von Trier

Writers: Lars von Trier, Peter Asmussen, David Pirie

Photography: Robby Muller

Music: Lars von Trier K-tel Collection

Editor: Anders Refn

Cast: Emily Watson, Stellan Skarsgard, Katrin Cartlidge, Adrian Rawlins, Sandra Voe, Jean-Marc Barr, Jonathan Hackett, Udo Kier

Breaking the Waves is laid out like a big fat 19th-century novel with parts and sections and chapters. It's set in the early 1970s, proclaimed both by the heavy sideburns on many of the men and by the soundtrack with Jethro Tull, Mott the Hoople, Procol Harum, Roxy Music, Rod Stewart, T. Rex, and others. It won the Grand Prix at Cannes and Emily Watson even got an Oscar nomination. It's director Lars von Trier's fourth feature-length movie, and possibly the one most responsible for setting his reputation as a transgressive bad boy of cinema, though later films have tended toward ever more fixated transgressions.

The challenges to propriety here are related to religion, mental illness, and gender roles—three of von Trier's favorite themes. Emily Watson is Bess McNeill, a young woman who lives in a small cloistered religious community in Scotland. The church is harsh and Calvinist. If you die unredeemed the funeral service includes reminders that you are now burning in hell. In Calvinism, as I understand it, only God knows whether you are redeemed, so the safe assumption seems to be that you aren't and it's appropriate to point that out as you are buried. Bess may or may not be mentally ill or developmentally challenged. It's hard to tell when the church has this much control over a person's life.

Melancholia (2011)

[Original 2011 Movie of the Year ballot here. This review first published May 24, 2013.]

Denmark / Sweden / France / Germany, 136 minutes
Director/writer: Lars von Trier
Photography: Manuel Alberto Claro
Music: Richard Wagner
Editor: Molly Marlene Stensgaard
Cast: Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Alexander Skarsgard, Brady Corbet, Charlotte Rampling, John Hurt, Stellan Skarsgard, Udo Kier, Kiefer Sutherland

I stumbled a little over my misgivings about director and writer Lars von Trier and actually needed to see this a couple of times before it clicked. Not that I can wholeheartedly recommend to anyone, ever, sitting twice through a movie that lasts more than two hours, let alone one by von Trier. But it worked for me. Or maybe I've just been in the mood lately for the end of the world. A friend put it on a DVD for me with more such tales, Last Night (the 1998 Canadian film), Perfect Sense, and Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, all of which suited my mood as well.

But Melancholia was the class of the bunch. In both Melancholia and his most recent before that, Antichrist, von Trier calculatedly puts a number of similar unlikely elements in juxtaposition: beautiful photography, beautiful music, fantastic and gruesome plot points, and a thick overlay of debilitating depression. And stars, in this case most notably Kirsten Dunst, who takes on not just one of the bravest roles I've seen attempted by her, but by anyone. She puts herself in a special class with this. I'm not talking about the nudity, thought that by itself would qualify for bravery. The depths of depression that she plumbs here feel personal, and deeply authentic, so much so that watching them almost starts to feel like a violation itself.

Dogville (2003)

Netherlands / Denmark / UK / France / Finland / Sweden / Germany / Italy / Norway, 178 minutes
Director/writer: Lars von Trier
Photography: Anthony Dod Mantle
Editor: Molly Marlene Stensgaard
Cast: Nicole Kidman, Harriet Andersson, Lauren Bacall, Jean-Marc Barr, Paul Bettany, Blair Brown, James Caan, Patricia Clarkson, Jeremy Davies, Ben Gazzara, Philip Baker Hall, Udo Kier, Chloe Sevigny, Stellan Skarsgard, John Hurt

Dogville actually represents the first installment in a "USA—Land of Opportunities" trilogy by the infamous bad boy director and screenwriter Lars von Trier, who by reputation so hates the US he has never even visited. The second episode, Manderlay, came two years later but flopped commercially and the third has yet to be made. For what it's worth, the funding for this movie came from no fewer than nine countries, not one of them the US. So perhaps inevitably I was mindful of that hatred while revisiting this lengthy and often annoying picture. Among other things it made me a little defensive about my homeland, even in this day and age when we are sliding into the abyss. At three hours, with heavy-handed aesthetic pretensions and an all-star cast representing many different phases of cinema history—Lauren Bacall! James Caan! Harriet Andersson! Chloe Sevigny! Ben Gazzara!—Dogville is self-evidently a Very Big Movie.

At its core, the premise is more or less an illustrative enactment of some social psychology experiment where people are given the opportunity to make moral choices and fail miserably—the Milgram Experiment, maybe, or the Stanford Prison Experiment. We're talking about human issues here more than American. At the same time, the signifiers make it hard to miss the point. It takes place in a semi-abandoned mining town in Colorado (called Dogville, the implication being that it's barely fit even for dogs), with not one but two characters named Thomas Edison, and placing gangsters, gun violence, and corrupt law enforcement in prominent positions of impregnable power. There's even an elaborate 4th of July celebration. The only thing missing is apple pie and ice cream.

Dancer in the Dark (2000)

Denmark / Spain / Germany / Netherlands / Italy / USA / UK / France / Sweden / Finland / Iceland / Norway, 140 minutes
Director/writer: Lars von Trier
Photography: Robby Muller
Music: Bjork
Editors: Francois Gedigier, Molly Marlene Stensgaard
Cast: Bjork, David Morse, Catherine Deneuve, Peter Stormare, Cara Seymour, Joel Grey, Vincent Paterson, Jean-Marc Barr, Vladica Kostic, Udo Kier, Zeljko Ivanek, Siobhan Fallon Hogan

On one sardonic level, it's all too possible to take this mordant plum as director and writer Lars von Trier's homage to The Sound of Music. Dancer in the Dark, after all, celebrates all musicals and that musical specifically as just about the one dim source of light in a narrative trajectory that hurtles vertiginously toward darkness. Iceland singer/songwriter, pop experimentalist, and charming weirdo Bjork capably plays Selma Jezkova, a Czech immigrant to the US, who is living and working a factory job in Washington state in the mid-'60s. She's a single mother, and she is going blind from a congenital disease. She is living in a rented space and friendly with the couple she rents from. Her one aim in life is to save the money for a surgical procedure that will prevent her son from going blind in turn—he has inherited the same condition from her.

What's that got to do with The Sound of Music? Glad you asked. Selma loves musicals and for most of this movie is rehearsing the part of Maria in a community production of the venerable lumbering Rodgers & Hammerstein chestnut. Its songs are interwoven into the action, wryly commenting on it at points. It's easy to miss its pervasive lurking presence because it's overshadowed by the numerous outbreaks of Bjork videos. Typically enough for von Trier, Dancer in the Dark is a movie that is going to two extremes at once (emphasis on "extreme"): a heartbreaking story of a victim of soulless predators, call it a '50s style woman's picture, and a musical which reserves all rights for playful fantasy. The result is bewildering, to say the least.