Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier, 2000)

Cast: Björk, Catherine Deneuve, David Morse, Peter Stormare, Joel Grey, Cara Seymour, Vladica Kostic, Jean-Marc Barr, Vincent Paterson, Siobhan Fallon Hogan, Zeljko Ivanek, Udo Kier, Stellan Skarsgard. Screenplay: Lars von Trier. Cinematography: Robby Müller. Production design: Karl Júliusson. Film editing: François Gédigier, Molly Malene Stensgaard. Music: Björk. 

Say what you will about Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard, 2024), but both its musical numbers and the melodramatic narrative that encompasses them are better than those in Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark. So why, other than that it was made first, does von Trier's film seem like the more substantial achievement? Both are formally audacious and, as far as audiences and critics are concerned, radically divisive. Dancer in the Dark goes over the top in both absurdity (people dancing on death row) and performance (Björk's raw emotion), but are either of those enough to earn the kind of ridicule and acclamation the film engendered? I was lukewarm about Emilia Pérez and I'm baffled by Dancer in the Dark, but is that enough for me to call the latter a masterpiece? Or is it just an astonishing cinematic dead end? 

Melancholia (Lars von Trier, 2011)

Cast: Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Alexander Skarsgard, Kiefer Sutherland, Cameron Spurr, Charlotte Rampling, John Hurt, Stellan Skarsgard, Brady Corbet, Udo Kier. Screenplay: Lars von Trier. Cinematography: Manuel Alberto Claro. Production design: Jette Lehmann. Film editing: Molly Malene Stensgaard. 

This is the way the world ends in Lars von Trier's Melancholia: with a bang, as a rogue planet collides with Earth, and a whimper from the terrified Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) as she and her small son, Leo (Cameron Spurr), and more resigned sister, Justine (Kirsten Dunst), await the cataclysm. What this eschatological moment has to do with the dysfunctional wedding reception that constitutes the first half of the film is something for us to ponder. Or not, because there are many who dismiss the film as yet another of von Trier's perverse and enigmatic fables that have something to do with human passion and cruelty but defy explication. Is von Trier just playing around with the science fiction genre, the way he played around with the horror movie genre in Antichrist (2009) and the skin flick in Nymphomaniac (2013), the other two films that constitute his trilogy about depression? Or is it art for expiation's sake, a work that by existing defies its own nihilism? The debate continues. 

Dogville (Lars von Trier, 2003)

Nicole Kidman and Zeljko Ivanek in Dogville

Narrator: John Hurt
Grace Margaret Mulligan: Nicole Kidman
Tom Edison: Paul Bettany
Gloria: Harriet Andersson
Ma Ginger: Lauren Bacall
Mrs. Henson: Blair Brown
The Big Man: James Caan
Vera: Patricia Clarkson
Bill Henson: Jeremy Davies
James McKay: Ben Gazzara
Tom Edison Sr.: Philip Baker Hall
Ben: Zeljko Ivanek
Olivia: Cleo King
Liz Henson: Chloë Sevigny
Chuck: Stellan Skarsgård

Director: Lars von Trier
Screenplay: Lars von Trier
Cinematography: Anthony Dod Mantle
Production design: Peter Grant
Film editing: Molly Malene Stensgaard

Lars von Trier's Dogville has weathered an initial critical reaction that dismissed it as "Our Town on downers" to become among his most admired films. But that may be in part because von Trier's life and works have been the focus of so much intense controversy since the film was made, so that Dogville looks like a relatively stable and focused work, especially in comparison with Antichrist (2009), which provoked walkouts at Cannes, and Nymphomaniac (2013), his sexually explicit epic-length film. Von Trier has also been plunged into controversy after joking in an interview that he was a Nazi -- he later apologized and said he was drunk when he made the comment -- and by charges of sexual harassment during the making of his films. He has become something of a latter-day poète maudit, whose defenders are as passionate as his detractors. But Dogville, though overlong and perhaps too show-offily "experimental" in its minimalism, tells a strong story with the help of some gifted performers, particularly Nicole Kidman, who gives one of the best performances of a remarkable career in the role of Grace, the gangster's daughter who winds up being abused by and then destroying the titular town. Some of the criticism initially directed at Dogville centered on its supposed "anti-Americanism," which seems to me wrong-headed. Is the barely masked greed and hypocrisy of Dogville's inhabitants indigenous to America? Is its portrayal of the dark side of frontier village life any more an indictment of America than that of the town of Presbyterian Church in Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), a film that I've never heard called anti-American? And anyway, there's nothing more American than the freedom and willingness to criticize America. Why not extend that freedom to Danish filmmakers, too?

Antichrist (Lars von Trier, 2009)

Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg in Antichrist

He: Willem Dafoe
She: Charlotte Gainsbourg
Nic: Storm Acheche Sahlstrøm

Director: Lars von Trier
Screenplay: Lars von Trier
Cinematography: Anthony Dod Mantle 
Production design: Karl Júlíusson
Film editing: Åsa Mossberg, Anders Refn

Any film that begins with a toddler climbing to an upper-story window and falling to his death while his parents have graphically photographed sex has a lot of work cut out for it. Unfortunately, Lars von Trier isn't up to the task he sets for himself: Antichrist is morally and intellectually confused in ways that even arch-provocateur von Trier's earlier films haven't been. It plays like a horror film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (if Tarkovsky had been a less grounded and imaginative director), which shouldn't be surprising since the film's credits include a "horror film researcher" and is dedicated to Tarkovsky, whose film The Mirror (1975) reportedly served as a direct inspiration for von Trier. Antichrist became a cause célèbre when it was shown at Cannes, where some people reportedly fainted and others walked out, but Charlotte Gainsbourg went on to win the best actress award. American critics were similarly divided, with A.O. Scott of the New York Times calling it "ponderous" and "conceptually thin and ... dull" but Roger Ebert praising both the commitment of the actors and the director's drive "to confront and shake his audience more than any other serious filmmaker -- even Buñuel and Herzog." Some critics had it both ways, praising it with reservations: Tom Long of the Detroit News labeled it "probably the best film ever that you'd recommend to absolutely no one." Ebert's measured praise seems to me the most appropriate: Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe are the main reasons anyone who is fascinated by the art of acting should see Antichrist. They throw themselves into near-impossible roles, full of contradictions and sometimes misconceived ideas about psychotherapy and the relationship between men and women, and yet manage to overcome the limitations of the screenplay. And while I would never mention von Trier in the same breath as Tarkovsky or Buñuel (Herzog, maybe), I can't help feeling that there is an immense talent at work in his films. Antichrist was born out of von Trier's period of clinical depression, and while that's not enough to excuse the film's incoherence, it certainly makes it more interesting as a personal work of art.

The Element of Crime (Lars von Trier, 1984)

Michael Elphick, Me Me Lai, and Lars von Trier in The Element of Crime

Fisher: Michael Elphick
Osborne: Esmond Knight
Kim: Me Me Lai
Kramer: Jerold Wells
Therapist: Ahmed El Shenawi
Housekeeper: Astrid Henning-Jensen
Coroner: János Herskó
Coroner's Assistant: Stig Larsson
Schmuck of Ages: Lars von Trier

Director: Lars von Trier
Screenplay: Niels Vørsel, Lars von Trier
Cinematography: Tom Elling
Production design: Peter Hølmark
Music: Bo Holten

Film noir becomes film jaune. The sulfurous hues of Lars von Trier's first feature-length film were apparently achieved with the use of sodium-vapor lamps not unlike the ones used in some cities as streetlamps and parking-lot illumination to cut down light pollution. The nightmarish monochrome so pervades the film that an occasional irruption of blue light comes as a welcome relief, especially since the determined grunge of the settings gives the eye no place to rest.  The Element of Crime is, in short, an assault on our expectations that a film will involve us in either its characters or its story. It's a detective story, in which Fisher, a former police detective now living in Cairo, visits a therapist to help him in remembering his last case -- the one so disturbing that it caused him to go into exile from Europe. Under an induced trance, he returns to the scenes of the crimes committed by a serial killer who murdered and dismembered young girls who sold lottery tickets. But the Europe -- no specific country, but though everyone speaks English, the place names are German -- to which Fisher returns in the trance is not the one his conscious mind recalls: It's a trashed-out land where the sun never shines and it always seems to be raining. There is a conventional film noir plot at work throughout the movie, but von Trier is less interested in it than in crafting a sinister dreamworld. He succeeds at that exceptionally, but fails to create a film that lingers in the mind as more than a tour de force in giving you the creeps.

Filmstruck Criterion Collection

Europa (Lars von Trier, 1991)

Jean-Marc Barr and Barbara Sukowa in Europa

We're accustomed to movies, usually blockbuster action films, in which the feats of filmmaking technology are more impressive than the narrative or characterization, but it's startling to find that kind of disjunction in a supposedly serious art-house film. That's what happens in Lars von Trier's Europa*, however. The film's visual tricks -- front and rear projection, double exposures, juxtapositions of black-and-white and color -- linger in the mind longer than any of the characters or the story. At base, Europa is a thriller, set in Germany in 1945, about an idealistic young American, Leopold Kessler (Jean-Marc Barr), whose German uncle (Ernst-Hugo Järegård) gets him a job as an apprentice conductor on the Zentropa railway line. Leo is an idealist and a pacifist (the film is rather vague about what he did during the war) who wants to help Germany recover, but this only makes him putty in the hands of various opportunists, from the American military to the railway owners to an underground group of die-hard Nazis known as "werewolves." Things grow more complicated for Leo when he falls in love with Katharina Hartmann (Barbara Sukowa), whose father, Max (Jørgen Reenberg), owns Zentropa and is undergoing scrutiny in the "denazification" efforts by the occupying Allied forces. This is standard, even promising, thriller material, and to a large extent von Trier and co-screenwriter Niels Vørsel deliver on its premises. There are moments of suspense and surprise -- especially the assassination of a newly appointed Jewish mayor by a young boy planted on the train by the werewolves -- that would do any thriller writer and director proud. And it has to be said that the general atmosphere of the film, a lingering sinister darkness and chill, is effectively produced. But the tarting up of the story with gimmicks takes me out of the narrative and into a concentration on the effects. For example, there's a scene in which Katharina, in monochrome, is standing behind Leo, who is in color, until she walks out of the frame and re-enters next to him, both now in color. Then Leo leaves the frame and re-enters, now in monochrome, behind her. I know how it's done -- rear projection and careful storyboarding -- but I remember the effect, and not anything that was said by the characters while the trick was taking place. Something of the same could be said about the frame in which von Trier sets his story: The film begins with a shot of railway tracks lighted by a moving train and the voice (Max von Sydow's calm baritone) of a man hypnotizing someone: "You will now listen to my voice. My voice will help you and guide you still deeper into Europa...." The voice recurs throughout the film until it's clear that the "you" is Leo. As for the "Europa" into which Leo is being guided, von Trier has explained that he had Franz Kafka's satirical fantasy Amerika in mind while making the film. The framing, I think, freights the story with more significance than anything that actually appears in the film. Von Trier has said that Europa is something like "Hitchcock in a Tarkovsky setting," which is nothing if not overreaching.

*Europa was released in the United States in 1992 under the title Zentropa to avoid confusion with Agnieszka Holland's Europa Europa, which had been released in 1991 in America. Von Trier also named his production company Zentropa, which is the name of the railway company in his film.