tMF | The Movie-Fanatic

Apparently someone had a seizure when the movie showed at the New York Film Festival recently. When I caught up with it at the Vancouver International Film Festival two weeks ago, the screening was punctuated with the single loudest shriek I've ever heard in the theatre -- that would have been when Gainsbourg gets out the scissors for a spot of ad hoc auto-surgery. There also was a very vociferous walk-out: a gentleman who fairly barked "You get what you pay for, folks" as he made for the exit a full 20 minutes before the end.

That unhappy camper had a point. Either von Trier is barking up the wrong tree, or he's pandering to the basest instincts of an audience that's seen it all before and still demands more, more, more.

Beautifully shot by Anthony Dod Mantle and acted with raw conviction, "Antichrist" is a calamitous atrocity from a major filmmaker, nothing more and nothing less. If you don't believe me, go ask the talking fox. [ read more ]

I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.

I think that Dogville certainly has this "poetic effect".

Von Trier went out of his way to ask for a non-literal reading of his film, with its artificial set, British-style narration and ritualistically formal acting and dialogue. Nevertheless, many American reviewers reacted with literal-minded fundamentalism (much like the Islamic fundamentalists reacted to Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses). Roger Ebert is a telling example of America's post-Trade Centre attack jingoism. In his review of Dogville, he claims that von Trier "approaches the ideological subtlety of a raving prophet on a street corner." Ebert goes on to reveal his own inability to perceive subtlety when he writes "I doubt that we [Americans] have any villages where the helpless visitor would eventually be chained to a bed and raped by every man in town." In my view this is an impossibly literal reading of the film and an assumption that the presentation of the town Dogville is an attempt to realistically portray America. Also, many reviewers seem to be caught up in the fact that Von Trier has never been to America, so "how dare he say anything about us!" In an interview at Cannes Film Festival 2005, the filmmaker articulated his defense and how he and many others in the rest of the world feel:

America is sitting on our world. I am making films that have to do with America [because] 60% of my life is America. So I am in fact an American, but I can't go there to vote, I can't change anything. I am an American, so that is why I make films about America.

A quick scan of reviews reveals just how complex and subtle Dogville actually is. James Berardinelli, on his website Reelviews, muses, "What does it all mean? The film is cleverly developed so that there are at least two apparent interpretations" and goes on to suggest that Grace could either represent the oppressed masses or North America, as in the formerly exploited and now oppressing North America. Stephen Holden of The New York Times reads it as "depicting as a lie the ideal of embracing human community (and especially the cozy, cookie-baking dream of small-town America)" and that its message is "that good people are resented for their virtue." Elbert Ventura of Allmovie.com, says that it "comments on the essential hypocrisy and meanness of America" but that the end-credit photo montage presented to the tune of David Bowie's "Young Americans" asks for "a more limited reading." [ read more ]