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Rating: Don't get me wrong. I love Von Trier. I love him with all my strength, with all my passion, with all my heart. In fact, I am fully convinced that he rightfully ranks among the five best living directors of Western cinema. Capable of playing divinely with cinema, of breaking its patterns, of reinventing, citing, breaking lines, and going beyond, Von Trier is responsible for some of the most beautiful European films of recent years: "Dancer In The Dark" (with a magnificent Bjork), "Dogville" (with a splendid Kidman), "Manderlay", "Antichrist", "Medea", and "Breaking the Waves" are just a few of the masterpieces he has directed and produced.
In this climate of almost underground, semi-intellectual, and voyeuristic beauty, I have always considered Von Trier's art split in two, across two boundaries: hallucination and beauty.
Hallucination is his first period. The one that starts from "The Kingdom" and goes back in time, from the first short films (Nocturne, a poem of grotesque sublime interiority, ending in a magnificent and heartrending finale). There are masterpieces in this period of transition ("Medea", "The Kingdom"), nerve-wracking but convincing experiments (Epidemic), difficult but fascinating films (Europa), and then there is "The Element of Crime": what I consider the black sheep of an immense filmography full of cinematic richness. An irritating film (and I use an euphemism) entirely played on aesthetics, on packaging.
It is his feature film debut, but despite everything, Von Trier is fully convinced of his abilities. And who can blame him? Every shot, every fragment, every color gradient (sepia) is a stroke of genius. The usual arabesque in the firmament of the seventh art. As only geniuses know how to do...
Yet the first impression that comes to mind when watching this film is that Von Trier has looked in the mirror and reflected on his skill, on his awareness of capturing life, death, the unhealthy with every frame. With the help of a camera. With the play of shadows and lights. Needless to say, the resulting film is an experience more than cinema. It is a film dominated by an absurd slowness, disorienting, but completely exacerbated and, indeed, hallucinogenic. It is not that fascinating slowness of certain auteur cinema, which finds its strength in slowness and stillness. Here it is a slowness that results in boredom. Pure boredom. And the desire to sink into the chair is overwhelming.
What reaches our eyes is only apparently an intriguing, phantasmagoric, dreamlike and surreal thriller, but which soon turns into an infernal vortex. That penetrates the brain and drives one mad, leading to the most overwhelming madness. Pure visual violence, without the use of concrete violence.
After forty minutes the brain is already frying, and you feel dead. The desire to smash the screen with a shovel is inevitable, grabbing you by the throat with its jaws and not letting go, to the point of being struck by sudden epileptic fits.
It is an LSD trip in celluloid, so pretentious and lazy as to be destabilizing. A journey into the twisted mind of an artist who reveals himself to be one of the world's highest connoisseurs of cinema, always ready to study and destroy cinema. Always beyond the line of the boundary.
It's nice to see, nonetheless, that there are people capable of appreciating such an experience. It's nice to see that there is someone with a lot of courage and passion to enjoy every frame of this film, which I find absolutely improbable.
I am too fragile, I know, but I take a handful of stardust and watch "Dogville" again. ^____^
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