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Idioterne (1998)
"The Idiots" may be von Trier's best
I have to admit I completely missed the mini-release of Lars von Trier's "The Idiots" last year - I even missed the release of the video! But I spotted it on the shelf last night, looking for something spiky to tide me over Thanksgiving, and I have to admit - it really did the job! This may be von Trier's best film, one in which he pretty much sheds the ponderous sexual melodrama that marred "Breaking the Waves" and "Dancer in the Dark".
Of course, be warned - this is EURO independent cinema, not American, which means it has a GENUINE edge - it's hardcore, in more ways than one. If your idea of "edgy" or "dangerous" is "Being John Malkovich" or "Boys Don't Cry", then you should probably avoid the Dogma-driven "The Idiots", in which full-frontal nudity is de rigeur (and on-camera urination and sexual penetration occur as well).
But if you want a funny, dirty, smart, irritating, and even infuriating satire of both the bourgeoisie and the bohemians who oppose it, then "The Idiots" is for you. von Trier has assembled a furiously talented cast of unknowns to spin this tale of a Danish commune that pretends - to the horror of the middle class masses that surround it - to be a private institution for "retards" and "spastics".
"The Idiots" travel around town in their van, invading bourgeois precincts like restaurants and swimming pools, and then generally shaking things up; shedding all physical dignity, they begin drooling, picking their noses, disrobing, peeing, and messing with the personal space of the appalled citizenry.
This is alternately funny, disgusting, and angering - but where the film becomes great is in its dissection of the bohemian mini-society that's perpetrating the big hoax. Led by the bitterly charismatic Stoffer, the rag-tag bunch is populated by the usual sexual misfits, mainstream drop-outs and screwed-up idealists, who are in complete denial of the personal failures that are driving their participation in the collective. The resulting scenes are instantly recognizable to anyone (like me) who's spent lengths of time in Bohemia - the irrational drift of the group's politics, the silly, self-serious conversations, the bickerings and territorial squabbles - in short, the bourgeois life writ small, only with more sex. (And believe me, it's a lot to pay for only a little more sex.)
For me, the best scenes lay in the skewering of the group itself. The scene in which one group member returns to "real life", to attend a high-powered meeting at his advertising agency, only to discover his "client" is actually one of the group's own spastics, is priceless. This is then topped by a viciously hilarious sequence in which one young guy imposes himself on a group of scary, tattooed bikers, drooling and moaning away. The bikers unexpectedly show fellow feeling, decide he must have to pee, lead him to the john, pull down his pants, and even aim his penis into the urinal, all as the poor kid desperately tries to urinate and stay in character. I'm not sure I've EVER laughed so hard.
The movie ends on a typically uncompromising note. The most enigmatic (and most recent) member of "The Idiots" provides the biggest surprise. When the test of "going native" rolls around - Stoffer challenges his followers to take their life style back into the "real world" - Karen rises to the challenge, and returns to a family that we always half-assumed rejected her. Only it turns out that SHE rejected THEM - after the death of her baby son, she didn't even go to the funeral - she just opted out of the tragedy completely. The scene in which she returns to her grieving, stone-cold husband and relatives, and then begins to twitch and drool, is nothing short of unbelievable. We can see in their chill why she left them - but we can also see how horrifying her behavior is in the context of insurmountable personal grief. The movie ends with a slap and a departure - hopelessly, in a way. There's no compromise between these two worlds - even if both are at bottom broken.
(Btw, the video I saw actually had little black boxes blocking out the male - and sometimes the female - genitalia. Look for the scene in which the little black box gets longer - it's a hoot all by itself!)
Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages (2000)
Is Michael Haneke God?
Well, I suppose not - but he IS the most exciting and interesting new filmmaker around. I would say "young filmmaker" - only he's not young; judging from his bio he's around 60. And he's not really "new", either - he's already made five films. But his films FEEL shockingly "new" - the MATERIAL is new; and it's some measure of how glacial the pace of real aesthetic change is in this supposedly-globalized world that he is only now becoming known in the U.S.
Those of you who have seen his best-known work, "Funny Games", would probably agree with me that it is the most horrifying movie ever made. "Games" coolly subverts the conventions of the horror movie to unremittingly punish the audience for its desire for violence. The effect is unbelievably harrowing.
Now we have "Code Unknown", which is not nearly as cruel an experience as "Funny Games", but which has the same strict intellectual armature. With as radical a technique as Godard's, Haneke takes a short scuffle in the streets of Paris as the point of departure for a meditation on true knowledge in a world of chance and mischance.
Haneke breaks the film up into short, disconnected fragments, with black spaces between them. In several no words are spoken, while others turn out to be "inside" films that the "lead" character, an actress played by Juliette Binoche, is making. Many are long, single shots - sometimes gliding along to follow the characters, but sometimes rooted in one spot as the characters drift to and fro. And the "stories", such as they are, wander too, from Paris to what looks like the Balkans, as Haneke follows Binoche, her war photographer boyfriend, his brother and father, a street beggar who is deported from Paris, a young black teacher of the deaf, and a host of other ancillary characters. What they don't understand - but we do - is that the course of their lives has been largely determined by encounters with people they'll never even know.
These people may think they're drowning in "too much information" - but actually, they don't have ENOUGH information; Haneke's recurring theme is our attempt to interpret a largely-unknown reality - and the problem of our responsibility to act on that interpretation. And despite a handful of longeurs, the effect is mostly completely absorbing. Those who were fascinated by the backwards-moving "Memento" will have a field day with "Code Unknown", where we have to tease out relationships, back story, and whether or not the narrative we're watching is "really" happening at all, with a lot fewer clues than Guy Pierce ever got.
And THEN - and this is what's interesting - somehow Haneke demands that we "make up our minds" about what we've seen; we feel compelled to judge, and yet we cannot - is the kid we see mistreating a beggar really a bad kid? Is the actress really being sealed up to die in a windowless room? Was the note from "a defenseless child" really written by an abused little girl (she turns up dead, so with a shock we appreciate what's at stake in our pause to consider the issue)? "Code Unknown" offers no answers - but then neither does life. The film ends with a scarily-happy drum-pounding by a chorus of deaf children.
I suppose what's startling about Haneke is that he has such an assured technique and yet eschews almost all directoral razzle-dazzle. He's not a Darren Aronofsky, ringing a dozen eye-popping changes on an essentially-empty story. And his intense horrors are justified by the depth and purity of his concerns - unlike those of, say, Tarentino or (God help us!) Guy Ritchie. Haneke's smarts are story and conceptual smarts, not adolescent film smarts; he's wildly daring, but he's icily mature. I'd almost say he's the heir to Kubrick's mantle, but these days that might be tarring him with an unwanted brush (as I watched "Code Unknown" I suddenly realized I was glad Pauline Kael was dead - she'd feel driven to sabotage this much intellectual challenge!).
I had to see "Code Unknown" at the Museum of Fine Arts here in Boston - however, there was a substantial crowd there; word is slowly getting out about Haneke. "Funny Games" is available on video (but be warned!); as far as I know, his latest, "The Pianist" (with Isabelle Huppert - Haneke's career is obviously being helped by interest from European-mainstream actresses) has yet to achieve a U.S. release. Here's hoping we'll see it in the States sometime soon.