At the movies: Nymph()maniac.

There really isn't anybody consistently making movies like Lars Von Trier these days. I mention Verhoeven and Daniels in this review of Nymphomaniac, and I stand by that equation, but it's as if the three occupy completely different spheres, other than the abstract sphere of being awesome. Anyway, it's opening in Nashville this weekend, and I recommend all four hours, though I don't advise piecemealing it. As a whole is the way to experience it.

At the movies: Melancholia.

New Von Trier. In Nashville. On 35mm. Bigger than life and more insistent than death. Don't miss it.

At the movies: Notorious.

Thank to the folks at the Nashville Scene, here's my pick for this week's Belcourt screening of 1946's Notorious. Which for some reason is illustrated with a photo from the Notorious B.I.G. biopic. Which is kind of funny.

At the movies: Antichrist.

Following the death of their child, She (Charlotte Gainsbourg, who won the Best Actress award at Cannes, and deservedly so) slips into an incapacitating grief spiral of loathing and disassociation. Naturally, her therapist husband He (Willem Dafoe) decides to embark on a rather extreme form of therapy for his wife, altering her medications and taking her to their cabin in the woods, Eden, to get away from the city and to help exorcise her pain and fears. And the thing about exorcisms, as we all know; they aren’t really easy, and once all that psychic turbulence is in the air, where does it go?

Antichrist sprang out of writer/director Lars von Trier’s crippling depression, one that left him questioning his career choices and life as a filmmaker. Made on the hush-hush with a couple of stars and little media attention, what emerged was the scandal of this year’s Cannes Film festival, where it provoked walkouts and vitriolic hatred from some viewers. Subsequent berths at the Toronto and New York Film Festivals found audience members vomiting in the aisles and mass chaos during the film’s extreme third act.

But it also found no less vocal a defender than Roger Ebert, whose championing of the film has given it a foothold in the precarious world of arthouse cinema. It also garnered a diverse following of film folk who dig on its hypersymbolic caterwaul, its arch sincerity, and its utter madness. This is one of the reasons the phrase "chaos reigns" has become an underground/overground phenomenon.

Antichrist is a strange film. Equal parts aggressive marriage therapy, Angela Carter-style fairy tale, Greek tragedy, and gorefest, it feels like nothing else Von Trier has ever done before, and moreso, its rough edges are infinitely revealing. There’s a sad helplessness to the violent underpinnings of He and She’s relationship, and anyone who has ever had to deal with abrupt shifts in medication will find a chord struck within in them by what this film does. Not for everyone, certainly, but a fascinating trip beneath the skin of what we call humanity.

Famous people talked to me... NYFF '09 Edition.

So at the 2009 New York Film Festival, I was more than willing to spread it around and talk to anyone at any kind of gathering I could. Press conferences, semiformal events, bum-rushing the stage following meaningful moments... No shame here, is what I'm saying. So I got to interact with two interesting directors, and both write-ups have been featured in this week's Metromix in my hometown. As I'm almost exclusively print-only for them, this is a big deal.

So here's some words from Lee Daniels, director of Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire, and Lars von Trier, writer/director of Antichrist.

A remarkable marketing achievement for Mr. LVMFT.

John Waters calls this the highest compliment an audience member can pay a film. I bet Lars von Trier would wholeheartedly agree.

Flashback at the movies: The Idiots.

As he was adapting J.G. Ballard's novel Crash for the screen, David Cronenberg would speak of several meetings he'd had with potential studio backers. Each of them wanted him to begin with the main characters grounded in normality, making the path of the film easier for audiences to identify with and to follow. With most films, it is rather easy to follow the path; no matter how many twists and turns you take, more often than not you'll wind up about where you started, with a little more knowledge and a few scratches, but ready to move on.

So what happens when you experience a film that never lets you know where you are on the path? I choose that terminology for a specific reason- you cannot just watch The Idiots. You have to experience it. As a film, it is far too precise in its use of the viewer's own sense of embarrassment to simply be viewed. And it is that queasy sense of nervousness and mortification that Writer/Director Lars von Trier uses to hook you. Or, as the derisive boos and innumerable walkouts which greeted the film at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival demonstrated, it is that queasy sense of nervousness which will drive you away. Not to mention the hardcore sex.

Ostensibly the tale of a collective of individuals so contemptuous of bourgeois society that they must act mentally disabled in public ("spassing," as they call it), The Idiots is a story about love and security, and how modern life, for most, is tragically devoid of either. This is the second film in von Trier's "Golden Heart" trilogy (the first being 1996's Breaking the Waves, the third 2000's Dancer in the Dark). This heroine is a melancholy and just soul named Karen (Bodil Jorgensen), who becomes our audience surrogate during the course of the film. She is found in a restaurant by three of the collective and brought into the group by her own kindness. Emotional need responds to emotional need, and she reaches out rather than withdrawing.

She begins to make friends with the group: the gentle and good-hearted Susanne (Anne Louise Hassing), the meek Josephine (Louise Mieritz, whose work here is quietly devastating), the bourgeois Axel (Knud Romer Jorgensen), the uncertain Jeppe (Nikolaj Lie Kaas, a gifted actor with a remarkably expressive face), the cipher Katrine (Anne-Grethe Bjarup Riis), as well as several other men and women. We see these men and women of the group in terms of the collective, yet we also experience their recollection of their time spent at the house in the Danish town of Sollerod. The film's timespace fragments, as an unseen interviewer asks the members about their time as idiots, and about their specific memories. There is one common element to each of their stories: Karen.

As Karen becomes an accepted member, taking in the various antics of the group, from a darkly comic trip to an insulation factory to an emotionally harrowing visit to the public pool, each time she experiences the group's tactics, sometimes as silent observer, other times as minder.

"You poke fun," she tells the group's argumentative leader, Stoffer (Jens Albinus). The group may spass all they want in public, but they return to their headquarters and evaluate each other's performance with clinical proficiency. What liberation can there be in such an empty and academic gesture? Von Trier tips no hands, making the motivation of each character a mystery to be untangled from the mess of rage, sadness, and raw aching need. As such, the film was an ideal choice to be made under the auspices of the Dogme 95 manifesto.

As developed by von Trier and three other renowned Danish filmmakers (Thomas Vinterberg, Soren Kragh-Jacobsen, and Kristian Levring), the basic tenets of Dogme 95 involve stripping artifice from filmmaking, eliminating artificial lighting, allowing only handheld cameras and recording only 'the moment,' which supersedes all other artistic aims. It is a kind of storytelling that is suited to emotional exploration and modern melodrama, and like its predecessor, Vinterberg's Festen (The Celebration), The Idiots opens itself up, warts and all, to the unflinching ugly eye of digital video. By the very nature of its visual reproduction, the use of DV lends a certain equality to the film's many surroundings, making every scene feel like something intercepted, making voyeurs of us all.

Which brings me to the hardcore sex. Fortunately for us Puritans here in the U.S., the MPAA decided that we didn't need to see what genitals do, and there is ample use of big black boxes to make sure that no one sees what happens to be between anyone's legs. As usual, the double standard is alive and well, because the MPAA has no problem with female nudity. It disturbs me that the ratings board of this country would rather give an R-rating to a film in which torsos are bloodily impaled on protruding spikes and nails (twice, as in the recent Exit Wounds) but not to a film that happens to have non-bloody consensual sexual activity. And for that matter, why did the film's US distributors feel the need to censor for an R-rating at all? The viewing habits of today's underage moviegoer do not include foreign films, even with sex and nudity, and especially with their parents. But I digress.

This is not a film for everyone. This is the kind of film I would not recommend to those who are skittish or easily offended, because those people are right to be skittish about this film. This is the kind of film that delivers many moments of absolute cinematic purity that burn very very brightly, detonating the emotional powderkeg that has been building up inside the viewer's shame and love centers. In the last half hour in particular, there is a very concentrated power that I can in no way define or articulate; my first viewing of this film left me so emotionally incapacitated that I had to turn around and immediately watch Charlotte's Web.

You will not be the same when this film is over.

So take that as a warning, but take also this enticement to those who feel that they are up for it: there are many paths to take in this film. Tread lightly, in case you have to find your way back.

Flashback at the movies: Dancer in the Dark.

I have a fondness for hard-hitting melodrama that I can date back to a very specific incident in my youth. One gloomy Saturday afternoon, my mother had me sit down and watch one of her favorite movies of all time, the Douglas Sirk remake of Imitation of Life. It was gaudy, overstylized, and methodically designed to reduce even the most stone-hearted viewer to tears. I loved it.

Several years later, I had a similar experience wherein my father had me watch John Waters' Female Trouble. I mention this, because if you were to take 70% of Imitation of Life and 30% of Female Trouble, you would have the basic tone of Lars von Trier's brutal musical epic Dancer in the Dark.

As emotionally wrenching as his sledgehammer-to-the-solar plexus love story Breaking the Waves and as formally intriguing as his own Dogme 95-derived ice pick into the subconscious of alienation and regret The Idiots, Dancer in the Dark tells the story of Czech immigrant Selma Jescova (Icelandic/Martian fairy princess/pop singer Bjork), who works double shifts at a steel sink factory in Washington State in the early sixties to save enough money to save the eyesight of her son. Selma is already feeling the effects of a particularly nasty form of congenital visual myopia, and she labors (at her own risk and the risk of her coworkers, oftentimes) ceaselessly to prevent her son Gene (newcomer Vladan Kostic) from suffering the same fate.

Selma, as played by Bjork, is almost a fragile, alien creature, possessed of delicate and unique features and a melodic brook of a voice. At no point in the film does she use anything approaching common sense, and yet her fierce resolve draws the viewer into tacit support of her, even as she remains alienating to both the audience and the other characters.

Even though she can barely see to make her proper steps, she is singing the role of Maria in a local production of The Sound of Music, and to hear Bjork's crystalline and visceral whoop of a voice tear into Rogers & Hammerstein is a treat in and of itself. Pulling double duty on this film (she also composed the unique and emotionally sumptuous songs), Bjork is almost as much the auteur as von Trier. Her character's obsession with musicals is such that even though she cannot see the screen, she attends the cinema religiously with her best friend Kathy (the ever-radiant Catherine Deneuve, here graceful as ever), who describes to her what happens on screen, even at some points tapping out the dance formations on the back of Selma's hand.

Deneuve’s unshowy work provides an emotional foundation to the film’s simultaneous canonization and mortification of Selma, as does Peter Stormare’s aching turn as Jeff, Selma’s meek and earnest suitor. Also of special note are the performances by David Morse (who is well-suited to emotional firestorms like this one, as anyone who has seen Sean Penn’s The Crossing Guard can attest) and Siobhan Fallon. An SNL alumna (and you might recognize her as the bus driver from Forrest Gump), Fallon here turns an oddly written part into a quietly devastating portrait of compassion.

If this all sounds twee, or corny, rest assured that it is not. There are a few moments of joy (the musical numbers, a gracious gift of a bicycle, some fancy candies) that are as welcome a relief as any for both the characters and the audience as wave after wave of hardship crashes into Selma and Gene. When an unscrupulous neighbor (and former friend) betrays Selma, a rickety Rube Goldberg machine of mortification and martyrdom is set into motion, as fixated on tragedy as Juanita Moore's radiant Annie Johnson in Imitation of Life or Divine's Dawn Davenport in Female Trouble.

This film has been brewing up controversy just about everywhere it goes, winning the Palme d'Or (Best Picture) and Best Actress (for Bjork) awards at this year's Cannes film festival amid scathing reviews and criticisms and equal amounts of ovation and booing at screenings. Writer/Director von Trier has always thrived on such drama, and it is apparent that he has no intention of mellowing any time soon (longtime von Trier fans will be pleased to know that the title of the film is still displayed against his mammoth name).

Equally iconoclastic and respectful to the classical Hollywood musical (the film even begins with an abstract overture, a pleasant touch that I last recall in the duelling space epics of 1979 Star Trek: The Motion Picture and The Black Hole), the films super-saturated DV musical numbers are both meticulously choreographed and messily assembled. Supposedly 100digital video cameras were used in the filming of these sequences, but you'd think that that sort of setup would allow for more satisfying coverage of the dance numbers. Unless, of course, there is a philosophical reason for it. And I believe there is. The muddy hues of digital video continually keep us behind the failing eyes of Selma, and even the deeply-hued musical sequences still look unnatural when compared to the inherent glamour of film.

Director of Photography Robby Muller (Dead Man, Breaking the Waves, Barfly), with von Trier as camera operator, crafts a unique landscape that gleams as often as it disappears, always finding the right light for the emotional center of the scene. As is typical of Von Trier’s work, jump cuts are present in abundance, though rather than being disorienting, they keep the flow of the dialogue continuous.

I wouldn't dream of spilling any of the beans, brazen plot machinations, or implausible tragedies that are sprung throughout the film, but I recommend you experience it in the spirit of Douglas Sirk, or Rainer Werner Fassbinder, or yes, even John Waters. Let’s just say that before this film finishes playing its cards that greed, anticommunism, the American judicial system, and the hearts and souls of the audience are all thrashed soundly AND you get to see the inimitable Joel Grey tap-dance in a showstopper of a number. This is not for everybody. This is hard-hitting melodrama at its most unique, experimental, and brutally alive.

I love technology: Zentropa Games presents...

If this is a hoax, then it is a well-thought out hoax.

If this is real, then I simply do not have the words. Magnificent.