The Merchant of Four Seasons (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1972)

Hans Hirschmüller and Irm Hermann in The Merchant of Four Seasons

Hans Epp: Hans Hirschmüller
Irmgard Epp: Irm Hermann
Anna Epp: Hanna Schygulla
Harry Radek: Klaus Löwitsch
Anzell: Karl Scheydt
Renate Epp: Andrea Schober
Mother Epp: Gusti Kreissl
Hans's Great Love: Ingrid Caven
Kurt: Kurt Raab
Heidi: Heidi Simon

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Cinematography: Dietrich Lohmann
Production design: Kurt Raab

Schlubby little (much is made of how much shorter he is than his wife) Hans Epp joined the Foreign Legion after washing out of the Munich police force for receiving a blowjob from a prostitute he had arrested, and now sells fruit from a pushcart he trundles through the courtyards of apartment houses. He is the object of scorn from his family because he never found a white-collar job, unlike his upwardly mobile brother-in-law and his intellectual sister Anna. His wife assists him in the fruit-selling business, working from a street stall, but it's clear that their marriage is troubled -- she spies on him at work, counting the minutes that he takes to deliver a bagful of pears to the woman he once proposed to. (She turned him down.) Even his mother doesn't love him: When he returns from the Foreign Legion and tells her that the friend who enlisted with him was killed, she retorts, "The good die young, but you come back." When he suffers a heart attack, his wife cheats on him while he's in the hospital, and then later lets him hire the man she slept with to take over the heavy-lifting part of the job. Despite all that's stacked against him, Hans manages to make a go as a merchant, but just as his family begins to praise him instead of dumping on him, he sinks into a deep depression and winds up drinking himself to death. If this all sounds terribly heavy-handed, it's lifted out of the suds in precisely the way Douglas Sirk made his films rise about their soap-operatic plots with sharp-eyed direction, flashes of wit, and sly social comment. The comparison to Sirk is an obvious one: Rainer Werner Fassbinder's breakthrough film was inspired by his study of the Hollywood master, whom he deliberately set out to imitate and, I think, managed to excel, if only because he wasn't handicapped by the money-making concerns and censorship of American film. There are some delicious performances, not only from Hans Hirschmüller as the sad-sack Hans and Irm Hermann as his sly helpmeet, but also from Hanna Schygulla as the somewhat sympathetic Anna. And the film ends with one of the most chilling exchanges in any Fassbinder film, as Irmgard and Harry, Hans's old Legionnaire buddy who has gone to work for him, drive away from the funeral and she proposes a business-like marriage to him. His terse reply, "Okay," perfectly sums up the emotionless, mercantile tone that pervades the film.

Murder! (Alfred Hitchcock, 1930)

Norah Baring, uncredited actress, and Herbert Marshall in Murder!

Sir John Menier: Herbert Marshall
Diana Baring: Norah Baring
Doucie Markham: Phyllis Konstam
Ted Markham: Edward Chapman
Gordon Druce: Miles Mander
Handel Fane: Esme Percy
Ion Stewart: Donald Calthrop
Prosecutor: Esme V. Chaplin
Defense Counsel: Amy Brandon Thomas
Judge: Joynson Powell
Bennett: S.J. Warmington
Miss Mitcham: Marie Wright
Mrs. Didsome: Hannah Jones
Mrs. Grogram: Una O'Connor
Jury Foreman: R.E. Jeffrey

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Alfred Hitchcock, Walter C. Mycroft, Alma Reville
Based on a novel and play by Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson
Cinematography: Jack E. Cox
Art direction: John Mead

Hitchcock's third talkie, after the commercial success Blackmail (1929) and the comparative flop Juno and the Paycock (1930), is a solid start toward establishing his reputation as a master of the thriller, or in this case the murder-mystery subgenre. Hitchcock's direction of it is full of innovative touches: an opening sequence in which a scream is heard and the camera pans across a series of windows from which curious heads emerge; a neatly staged scene in which the investigation of the murder takes place in the wings of a theater, where people being interrogated sometimes interrupt their testimony to make their entrances; a scene that takes place in the jury room and lingers there as we overhear the sentence being delivered, with only a janitor tidying up in the actual frame; a voiceover by Herbert Marshall as we see his reflection in a mirror -- accomplished in those pre-dubbing days by playing a recording of Marshall speaking his lines. But frankly, Murder! is a bit of a mess, filled with improbable twists. For example, Marshall's character, Sir John Menier, an eminent actor-producer, winds up on the jury even though he has a prior acquaintance with the defendant, Diana Baring. And somehow, even though he believes her to be innocent, he is bullied by the other jurors into voting guilty. He then turns detective to try to overturn the verdict. The motive for the murder is equally muddled: something to do with the fact that the murderer, who turns out to be a circus trapeze artist who performs in drag, is "half-caste" -- a secret that he is willing to kill in order to protect. But this muddle has its moments, such as the one in which the dignified Sir John spends the night in a house near the murder scene, to be awakened by the landlady (the always valuable Una O'Connor) and her gaggle of noisy kids. Better, tighter scripts were to come, but Hitchcock gives this one better than it's due.

Boyhood (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1951)

Akiko Tamura and Akira Ishihama in Boyhood

Ichiro: Akira Ishihama
Mother: Akiko Tamura
Father: Chishu Ryu
Teacher Shimomura: Renaro Mikuni
Toyo: Toshiko Kobayashi
Mrs. Yamazaki: Mutsuko Sakura
Furukawa: Takeshi Sakamoto
Headmaster: Ryuji Kita

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita, Sumie Tanaka
Based on a novel by Isoko Hatano
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

It's easy to see why Keisuke Kinoshita was one of Japan's most popular directors: He had that audience-pleasing ability to create identifiable characters and familiar situations, along with a sincere desire to make a statement about ordinary people caught up in the sweep of history. Like his Twenty-Four Eyes (1954), Boyhood is about people in wartime but not where the conflict rages most fierce -- the conflicts in Boyhood are interpersonal and internal, not international. Ichiro is a 15-year-old boy, too young to fight in the war. When his family -- mother, father, two younger brothers -- relocates to the country during the war, Ichiro chooses to stay behind in Tokyo so he can continue his studies. But the first air raid finds him on a train to see his family, and when he returns to school he finds that he has fallen behind the other students and is stigmatized for his flight. So he joins his family in the country and starts at a new school, where he is an outcast, in part because the rural people treat the refugees from the city with scorn. He also feels at odds with his father, an intellectual who tacitly disapproves of the war, and is disturbed by the fact that his mother does most of the work to keep the family fed and housed, while his father continues with his studies. Ichiro is regarded as a weakling by his fellow students, and the teachers, most of whom preach the militaristic virtues of strength and self-sacrifice, do little to help. When the lake freezes over in winter, for example, Ichiro finds that he is incapable of learning to skate, and though he makes a determined effort, he's mocked for his failure. Not as wrenchingly sentimental as Twenty-Four Eyes, Boyhood still elicits strong feeling because Kinoshita sticks with Ichiro's point of view -- his desire to fit in, his closeness to his mother, and his confusion about his father's distance from the reality of what is happening around them. At the conclusion of the film there's a measure of triumph in the defeat of militarism at the war's end, but there's also a feeling of a lack of resolution to Ichiro's story.

Julieta (Pedro Almodóvar, 2016)

Adriana Ugarte and Rossy de Palma in Julieta

Julieta Arcos: Emma Suárez
Younger Julieta: Adriana Ugarte
Xoan: Daniel Grao
Ava: Inma Cuesta
Lorenzo: Darío Grandinetti
Beatriz: Michelle Jenner
Marian: Rossy de Palma
Julieta's Mother: Susi Sánchez
Beatriz's Mother: Pilar Castro
Antía: Blanca Parés
Young Antía: Priscilla Delgado
Young Beatriz: Sara Jiménez

Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Screenplay: Pedro Almodóvar
Based on stories by Alice Munro
Cinematography: Jean-Claude Larrieu
Production design: Antxón Gómez
Music: Alberto Iglesias

Julieta is low-key for a film by Pedro Almodóvar. It has the familiar bright pops of color and the characteristic involvement in the lives of women, but it rarely surprises or startles you with either its events or outbursts from its characters. Its use of two actresses to play the same title character has been likened to Luis Buñuel's casting two actresses in the same role in That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), but Buñuel's film features two very different-looking actresses in scenes that are occurring in the same time period, a disorienting effect when Buñuel switches from one to the other. In Julieta, Emma Suárez and Adriana Ugarte play the title character at different periods in her life, and although the two actresses don't look very much alike, there's little disorientation when one takes on the role from the other. Almodóvar has said that he didn't want to mess around with old-age makeup, and he's right. As the film begins, the older Julieta is packing to move to Lisbon with Lorenzo when a chance encounter on the street with Beatriz, an old friend of her daughter, Antía, causes her to abruptly chance her mind and stay in Madrid. We learn that Julieta and Antía have been estranged for many years -- the daughter even has children that Julieta has never met. In hopes that Antía will make a move to reconciliation, Julieta even moves to an apartment in the same building in which they lived when Antía was growing up. And she begins to write the story of how she met Antía's father, Xoan, initiating a flashback in which Ugarte takes over the role of Julieta from Suárez. Like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Almodóvar has always had strong ties to the films of Douglas Sirk, with their tortured love affairs and strong, beleaguered female protagonists, and like Sirk, both filmmakers use melodrama as a vehicle for social comment, particularly on the roles of women. Julieta touches on the still-pervasive and often repressive role of religion in Spanish life, but the film isn't out to make a point about it other than incidentally. The real focus of the film is on the unraveling of the story of Julieta herself as she comes to terms with female friendships and rivalries. The men in the film, from the passionate Xoan to the almost sexless Lorenzo, are decidedly secondary, there only to stir the plot and to spur Julieta's involvement with the other women in their lives. It's a splendidly crafted movie, but it feels at the end like one that was begun without a clear destination.  

Starz

Two English Girls (François Truffaut, 1971)

Jean-Pierre Léaud and Kika Markham in Two English Girls

Claude Roc: Jean-Pierre Léaud
Ann Brown: Kika Markham
Muriel Brown: Stacy Tendeter
Mrs. Brown: Sylvia Marriott
Madame Roc: Marie Mansart
Diurka: Philippe Léotard

Director: François Truffaut
Screenplay: François Truffaut, Jean Gruault
Based on a novel by Henri-Pierre Roché
Cinematography: Néstor Almendros
Production design: Michel de Broin
Costume design: Gitt Magrini
Music: Georges Delerue

Late in his life, Henri-Pierre Roché wrote two semi-autobiographical novels about his life and romantic entanglements in the artistic circles of Paris at the turn of the 20th century. Since François Truffaut had his first great success as a director with one of them, Jules and Jim (1962), it's not surprising that he turned again to Roché for inspiration almost a decade later in Two English Girls. Both are about romantic triangles, though with a woman and two men in the first film, and a man and two women in the second. But where Jules and Jim is loose and larky, Two English Girls is slow and stately, its characters stewing in their frustrations and uncertain desires. Part of the difference may lie in the fact that the pivotal character in the first film is Jeanne Moreau and in the second film it's Jean-Pierre Léaud. Both are remarkable actors, but Moreau centers the film an element of mystery that gets diffused when Léaud becomes the protagonist, forced to deal with his attraction to two very different sisters. We know instantly why Jules and Jim are so fascinated by Moreau's Catherine, but in Two English Girls the difficulties among Claude, Ann, and Muriel, centering in large part on sexual morality, are not so provocatively drawn. So the tension among the figures in the triangle goes a little slack in Two English Girls, which at some point turns into a meditation on the differences in nationality and religion (or the lack of it). Roché's novel was titled Les deux anglaises et le continent, emphasizing the Channel-wide gap between the characters. ("The continent" is the Brown sisters' epithet for Claude, erecting a kind of geographical barrier reminiscent of the one between Henry James's Americans and Europeans.) Two English Girls is beautifully filmed by Néstor Almendros, and it has a lovely unobtrusive score by Georges Delerue (who also appears on camera in the role of Claude's business agent), but Truffaut's adaptation, relying heavily on voiceover narration, never overcomes a lack of dramatic incident inherent in the source. It takes patience and concentration to fully appreciate the intricacies of the relationships in the film.

Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Blackmail (Alfred Hitchcock, 1929)

Cyril Ritchard and Anny Ondra in Blackmail

Alice White: Anny Ondra, Joan Barry
Frank Webber: John Longden
Tracy: Donald Calthrop
The Artist: Cyril Ritchard
Mrs. White: Sara Allgood
Mr. White: Charles Paton
The Landlady: Hannah Jones
The Chief Inspector: Harvey Braban

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Alfred Hitchcock, Benn W. Levy
Based on a play by Charles Bennett
Cinematography: Jack E. Cox
Film editing: Emile de Ruelle
Music: Jimmy Campbell, Reginald Connelly

Anny Ondra has the distinction of having appeared in both Alfred Hitchcock's final silent film, The Manxman (1929), and his first talkie, Blackmail. Unfortunately, it was the arrival of sound that put an end to her nascent career in English-language films. Blackmail was begun as a silent movie, but not long after filming started Hitchcock got what he wanted: permission to turn it into a talkie. Which presented a problem for Ondra, who was born in a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire that is now Poland and grew up in Prague, where she was a successful stage actress, and had been unable to lose her accent. In the infancy of film sound, a satisfactory technique of dubbing another actor's voice had yet to be developed, so actress Joan Barry was hired to speak Alice White's lines off-camera as Ondra silently mouthed the words. (After Blackmail, Ondra returned to the continent and was a major star in Czech and German films; she married boxer Max Schmeling in 1933.) The tricky problem of synching Barry's voice with Ondra's performance only spurred Hitchcock to other innovative uses of sound, for example the scene in which Alice White, stunned by having stabbed her assailant to death, hears a neighbor chattering about the murder and repeating the word "knife," which becomes increasingly louder until Alice breaks down in hysterics. Hitchcock also pioneers a gag he will use again: Alice opens her mouth to scream, but in a quick cut the scream comes from the landlady who has discovered the victim's body. The cut anticipates the one in The 39 Steps (1935) in which a woman's scream becomes the shrill whistle of a locomotive. Sound was still such a novelty that a silent version of Blackmail was made for theaters still not equipped for it. And even in the sound version the first six minutes of the film, which take place in the streets where the London police "flying squad" makes an arrest, are silent except for the background music, even though we see cops talking to each other and there are plenty of opportunities for ambient sound. Some scenes also have that curious slackness of pace of early talkies, as if the directors were uncertain about how quickly audiences could assimilate spoken dialogue. But it's far more "Hitchcockian" than most of his late silent films in that he's working effectively with thriller material, including a chase through the British Museum that anticipates his later exploitation of such landmarks as the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur (1942) and Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest (1959). It also contains the longest of Hitchcock's familiar cameo appearances, as a passenger on the Underground being tormented by a small boy.

Turner Classic Movies

Germany Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini, 1948)

Edmund Moeschke in Germany Year Zero

Edmund Köhler: Edmund Moeschke
Herr Köhler: Ernst Pittschau
Eva Köhler: Ingetraud Hinze
Karl-Heinz Köhler: Franz-Otto Krüger
Herr Henning: Erich Gühne

Director: Roberto Rossellini
Screenplay: Roberto Rossellini, Carlo Lizzani, Max Kolpé
Cinematography: Robert Juillard
Film editing: Eraldo Da Roma
Music: Renzo Rossellini

Roberto Rossellini's harsh, tragic vision of Germany in the immediate aftermath of World War II is suffused with an odd mixture of sentimentality and Schadenfreude. Any film that centers on the experiences of a 12-year-old boy in the ruins of Berlin is bound to be touched with sentiment, of course, but Rossellini's Edmund Köhler becomes less a real human child than the embodiment of ideas about the war, its causes, and its legacy. At the film's beginning, Edmund is seen with a kind of documentary clarity as he's fired from a job as a gravedigger because he's too young, then on his way home encounters a crowd of people hacking meat from the carcass of a horse that has apparently fallen dead in the street. Shooed away from there, he manages to scavenge a few lumps of coal that fall from a passing truck. It's when he reaches home that he becomes a figure in a fable: His family, billeted by the authorities on the reluctant owner of an apartment house, consists of an invalid father, a somewhat petulant older sister, and a brother whose refusal to register with the authorities -- he was a soldier in the Wehrmacht to the bitter end and remains convinced that the Nazis were right -- deprives them of a stipend they need to survive. His sister cadges cigarettes -- a virtual currency in the postwar barter system -- from men in nightclubs but is too proud to prostitute herself, so Edmund is the primary support of the household. This eventually puts him in the literal and figurative clutches of an unfortunately stereotypical homosexual, a former teacher of his whose pederastic tendencies are manifest in his constant fondling of the boy. The nightmarish story of what happens to Edmund is well told, but Rossellini's determination to make it a kind of Götterdämmerung of the German people, deservedly punished for their crime of bringing Hitler to power, undermines what gives the film its real strength: its documentary vision of a city and a country in ruins.

Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Early Hitchcock

The Ring (Alfred Hitchcock, 1927)

Ian Hunter, Carl Brisson, and Eugene Corri in The Ring

"One-Round" Jack Sander: Carl Brisson
Bob Corby: Ian Hunter
Mabel: Lillian Hall-Davis
The Promoter: Forrester Harvey
The Showman: Harry Terry
Jack's Trainer: Gordon Harker

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Alfred Hitchcock
Cinematography: Jack E. Cox

The Farmer's Wife (Alfred Hitchcock, 1928)

Lillian Hall-Davis and Jameson Thomas in The Farmer's Wife

Farmer Sweetland: Jameson Thomas
Araminta Dench: Lillian Hall-Davis
Churdles Ash: Gordon Harker
Widow Windeatt: Louie Pounds
Thirza Tapper: Maud Gill
Mary Hearn: Olga Slade
Mercy Bassett: Ruth Maitland

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Eliot Stannard
Based on a play by Eden Phillpotts
Cinematography: Jack E. Cox


The Manxman (Alfred Hitchcock, 1929)

Anny Ondra, Carl Brisson, and Malcolm Keen in The Manxman

Pete Quilliam: Carl Brisson
Philip Christian: Malcolm Keen
Kate Creegen: Anny Ondra
Caesar Creegen: Randle Ayrton
Mrs. Creegen: Clare Greet

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Eliot Stannard
Based on a novel by Hall Caine
Cinematography: Jack E. Cox

These nicely restored silent Hitchcock films don't have a lot that's "Hitchcockian" about them except his ability to tell a story visually. Even compared to his other silents like Downhill (1927) and especially The Lodger (1927), they feel a little routine. What sets them apart from his later work is the focus on working-class people: carnival workers, farmers, and fishermen. Two of them are romantic melodramas involving a love triangle, the other a comedy about a widower in search of a wife. The Ring is the liveliest, with an impressive opening sequence that establishes the carnival setting with some kinetic camerawork and introduces the hero, "One-Round" Jack Sander, a carny boxer who takes on all comers, with the promise that anyone who lasts more than one round with him wins a pound. His girlfriend, Mabel, is the ticket-taker, and our first sight of Jack in the ring comes as she pulls up a flap between her booth and the interior -- a characteristic Hitchcock point-of-view take. Hitchcock also doesn't show the fights at first, only the boastful contenders being knocked back by Jack's punches, until his real antagonist, the professional fighter Bob Corby, puts up a real fight. From there, it's a story of Jack's rise as a pro and Mabel's increasing infatuation with Corby, even after she marries Jack. This is the only film on which Hitchcock took a solo credit as screenwriter, and though it's an entirely predictable plot, it's a workable one. Carl Brisson, the handsome Danish actor who plays Jack, returns in The Manxman, which is somewhat overplotted -- it's based on a popular novel. Once again, he's on the outs in a marriage. Pete, a fisherman, loves Kate, a publican's daughter, who agrees to wait for him while he earns his fortune on an overseas voyage, but she also loves Philip, Pete's best friend, a lawyer with ambitions to become a "deemster," the name for a judge on the Isle of Man. And when a report comes that Pete has been killed, she and Philip feel free to indulge their love, though his family opposes their marriage as destructive to his ambitions -- apparently Philip's father damaged his career by marrying beneath him. When Pete turns up very much alive, he marries Kate, who is pregnant with Philip's child, whereupon much anguish ensues. Eliot Stannard wrangles the material from the Hall Caine novel into something coherent, but Hitchcock rarely seems terribly interested in it. The Farmer's Wife gives Hitchcock a chance to show off a talent for comic pacing that he rarely exhibited in his later career except in the "lighter side" moments of his thrillers and in such marginally successful comedies as Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941) and The Trouble With Harry (1955). The film opens with Farmer Sweetland's wife on her deathbed, followed shortly by the marriage of their daughter, leaving the farmer open to suggestions that he needs to take a new wife. Completely, and somewhat illogically, ignoring the pretty housekeeper, Araminta, he courts -- disastrously -- some obviously unsuitable local women before realizing that Araminta is the one for him. A hint of misogyny pervades The Farmer's Wife in the comic portrayals of the mannish Widow Windeatt, the prudish Thirza Tapper, and the hysterics-prone Mary Hearn. It could be said that a similar misogyny colors the portrayals of Mabel in The Ring and Kate in The Manxman, women who seem to have no fixity in their affections. But Hitchcock was never the most "woke" director when it came to the treatment of women in his films.

Turner Classic Movies

Love in the Afternoon (Éric Rohmer, 1972)

Bernard Verley in Love in the Afternoon

Frédéric: Bernard Verley
Chloé: Zouzou
Hélène: Françoise Verley
Gérard: Daniel Ceccaldi
Fabienne: Malvina Penne
Martine: Elisabeth Ferrier

Director: Éric Rohmer
Screenplay: Éric Rohmer
Cinematography: Néstor Almendros

Love in the Afternoon, released in the United States originally as Chloé in the Afternoon, is the last of Éric Rohmer's cycle of "Six Moral Tales," and it may be the most conventionally moralistic of them all. It's about a man, Frédéric, happily married, with one child and another on the way, who indulges in the fantasies about women in which all men indulge -- even Jimmy Carter, remember, confessed to committing lust in his heart. He's careful to avoid anything other than fantasies until an old acquaintance, Chloé, re-enters his life. Free-spirited and footloose in ways that Frédéric once remembers being, Chloé offers an enlargement of his fantasies: a dalliance that never extends to sexual intercourse -- until, of course, the day that consummation actually looms. Like most of Rohmer's "Tales," Love in the Afternoon is mostly talk -- rich, stimulating dialogue that only the philosophically loquacious French seem able to indulge in. It's a tour de force in sexual tension, with splendid performances by Bernard Verley and Zouzou -- one of those supremely French jolie laide actresses who audibly suck on their cigarettes.

Filmstruck Criterion Channel

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