Just exactly who is the idiot hiding behind The Idiots, bratty Danish director Lars von Trier's latest film release?
Good question. No easy answer. Von Trier has many guises as a maverick artist of the cinema.
One of them is sublime genius, as we saw realized in the stunning Europa (or Zentropa, as it was known in the U.S.).
One of them is radically controversial for its own sake, as we saw when Dancer In The Dark, starring pop singer Bjoerk, won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival last month despite some of the harshest criticism of his life.
In The Idiots, however, von Trier just careens into the ridiculous, the creepy and the self-indulgent.
Written as well as directed by von Trier, The Idiots is a 1998 production only now getting its commercial release in Canada. It was the second 'official' Dogma 95 film, made under a list of rules von Trier helped draw up in collaboration with three other Danes. Of course, he breaks some of the rules, but so have all the others in their work.
Nevertheless, The Idiots is as close to a real Dogma 95 film as you're ever going to see. That means it is a contemporary story, shot on location and all done with hand-held cameras, natural light and no added props. And that means the deliberately sloppy, unsteady, often unfocused camera work will make your head spin and your guts churn.
But the most important thing is the story. And von Trier really crosses some lines here. The Idiots is a drama about 'middle class' renegades who live together in a post-modern commune, posing as mentally handicapped people in order to free themselves from their staid, boring lives.
Of course, what they end up doing is create a whole new level of boredom because of the rigidity and stupidity of what they do. And that is to show up in public places pretending to be severely disturbed, drooling, physically challenged or extremely mentally unbalanced.
The challenge is to unsettle society. The goal is to find "the inner idiot" in each of us.
On a certain level, the idea is intriguing, and one of the characters, the outsider (played by Bodil Jorgensen), will really get to anyone who stays to the bitter end.
But the film, as it is played out for most of its length, veers too close to gross exploitation of people with mental and physical challenges, especially because the characters in the film are often derisive of those they dismiss as "retards."
In the end, it will all go to ruin, especially when a party deteriorates into a Roman orgy replete with a gratuitous and extremely graphic porno scene spliced in. (Von Trier used body doubles for the actual sexual penetration scene, thereby violating Dogma 95 and grossing out the audience needlessly; you will see the real sex act for a few seconds of screen time.)
Combine the dubious content of the film with its herky-jerky technical style, and von Trier does the audience no favours. He seems to think we're the idiots.
(This film is rated R)
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