March 19, 2004
By D.K. Holm
Dogme Goes to Dogtown
DOGVILLE
[nota bene: The following review, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending, don't read on!]
At the risk of sound anti-American, I loved DOGVILLE.
Lars Von Trier's new film is already causing a stink of controversy because though it is set in a desiccated Colorado mining town in the 1930s, Von Trier has never visited the United States, and the film itself concludes with a photo montage under the credits of impoverished Americans, which many people have taken to be a swipe at the country's inability to tame poverty and starvation despite its great wealth.
I liked the film anyway.
In the past I've had ambivalent feelings about Von Trier. For example, I loved the murky X-FILES feel of ZENTROPA, and the cruel satire of THE KINGDOM. But I was a little put off by the religious zealotry of the Christianity in BREAKING THE WAVES. Trier (he added the "Von" in film school) was raised thinking he was Jewish only to learn as an adult — in a biographical surprise that matches the one Jack Nicholson experienced — that his biological father was someone else, and a gentile (the reverse of what happened to Christopher Hitchens); his adult conversion to Christianity seems to have more to do with his admiration for his Danish cultural forebear, Carl Dreyer than anything else. Still, BREAKING THE WAVES had a certain surface power, and there is something about great directors that causes their overall career to transcend their individual efforts. Meanwhile, his ideological pet project Dogme '95 is a fine joke that all its participants took wonderfully seriously.
Like some of his previous films, DOGVILLE concerns a woman who appears to be a saint figure whom society surprisingly turns on. Von Trier works in trilogies. His first three feature films dwelled on post-war Europe. BREAKING THE WAVES, DANCER IN THE DARK, and THE IDIOTS examined a woman who sacrifices herself for a higher good (I haven't seen THE IDIOTS, by the way). DOGVILLE is the first in a new trilogy called USA — LAND OF OPPORTUNITIES, focusing on American issues (though strictly speaking it feels more like the third in the female saint series, and has some linkage with DANCER).
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The film begins with Grace (Nicole Kidman) arriving one night like a fugitive in the mountain town of Dogville. She is on the run for (at first) unstated reasons. The town intellectual, Tom Edison (Paul Bettany), instantly falls in love with her and convinces his fellow citizens to harbor her for a while. During this grace period, she manages to win then over through her diligent attention to their needs: the mean storeowner (Lauren Becall), the harried housewife (Patricia Clarkson), the shamed blind man pretending that he can still see (Ben Gazzara).
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But soon, and for subtle reasons, the township begins to turn against her. They start working her to death. Nothing is ever good enough for them. They patronize her. The men of Dogville begin using her sexually (her role as a sexual tool is reminiscent of the uses to which the comatose Bride in KILL BILL is put). When she tries to escape she is chained to an iron anchor by a collar with a bell attached. The bell on her collar echoes the church bell that churchwoman Martha (Siobhan Fallon) is so obsessed with, the bell that is supposed to unite the citizenry, but doesn't, because there is no pastor.
DOGVILLE is a long movie but never boring, at least to one viewer. It's also suspenseful to one used to Von Trier treating his women in the most sardonic manner. Those innured to the director's female characters experiencing Gibsonian barbarities, however, are in for some surprises.
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Now that the plot is out of the way the most important thing to observe about DOGVILLE is that the film looks like few others. Von Trier staged it in a warehouse near his filmmaking facilities and all the exteriors are really interiors. What's more, he didn't bother with actual sets. For the most part the town of Dogville is made up of white lines on the ground, like the floor plan for a stage set yet to be built. And he shot it digitally. He has taken a tale of abject melodramatic realism and shot it in the most artificial manner possible. Yet it works. The overall effect is a little like a technologically improved version of an old Playhouse 90-like TV dramatization. The opening shot of the film is an overhead shot of Dogville, which gives the viewer the whole floor plan (in fact it's a shot a lot like an early shot in the new DAWN OF THE DEAD).
What's more, the film is narrated (and divided into nine "chapters" and a prologue). This narration has the ironic, mocking quality of Michael Hordern's in BARRY LYNDON, sometimes even mirroring verbally what you are already seeing on the screen. It becomes almost a critical text analyzing the film as it unspools. It's an audio commentary track built into the movie (which reminds me: the film is already out on DVD in England in an edition that has reviewers squawking that it's perhaps the best DVD presentation of a movie ever).
Von Trier's "vision" of America, if it is anything as grandiose as that, is a fundamentally conservative, even paranoid vision. It's one that sees ordinary people as being one brain stem away from savage self-interest. Crowds are evil. It's a film that Fritz Lang, or Roman Polanski could make (perhaps especially after seeing what evil crowds in Europe could do). It's amusing that the sin Dogvillagers charge Grace with is "arrogance." After all, that is the sin of a crowd.
I find the script itself to be breathtakingly brilliant. I almost can't believe that Von Trier wrote it himself, although the 47-year-old does admit to such unfamiliarity with colloquial English that he now realizes the title should have been DOGSVILLE (I wonder what the phrases dictim ag factum — if I have it right — atop the abandoned mine means).
The film has already been likened to a nightmare version of OUR TOWN, or a variation on Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery" (no, that was Stephen King's mini-series STORM OF THE CENTURY). It's a mirror image of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's play THE VISIT, though Von Trier himself says that the story was inspired by a song in a Brecht play.
The acting is uniformly excellent. Kidman has never been more glorious (for me it is her best performance since DEAD CALM). Kidman has a rep for being icy on screen, like Deneuve, but like Deneuve, she is really kind of masochistic in her choice of parts. Also, by the way, Nicole was born to chew gum. She's one of the great gum-chewers, like Brando or Susan George.
Paul Bettany as the unsubtly monikered Tom Edison is out of a Neil LaBute play. He's the well-meaning guy who is actually worse than everyone else, thanks to his hypocrisy and weak spine. Cruelly, everyone male in the town (in his view) gets to "fuck" Grace but him, a nice touch, and one that makes the viewer hate him even more for his blinkered inability to see Grace's real plight.
But mostly the film is breathtaking for its technical artistry. The fact that it's shot in a warehouse gives Dogville a claustrophobic atmosphere. The lack of walls at first creates the comforting feeling of a city that is thriving. While someone is talking in the foreground, you can see other citizens going about their business in the background. It suggests the appearance of unity. But later the transparency suggests how blind we are to what is going on around his, as a few Dogvillians are talking in the foreground while in the background, through the non-existent walls, we can see Grace being raped by one of her "protectors."
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The form of DOGVILLE raises a fascinating question. Just what is a movie? Does it have to be realistic? Does it need to be slick and smooth like so many Hollywood dramas? Does it have to have exteriors, and the feel of the wind in its hair? There are many movies that embrace artificiality in their manner, THERESA, THE NASTY GIRL, CLOSETLAND, and almost the complete oeuvre of Guy Maddin, among them. Von Trier is raising interesting questions not only about life in a troubled world, but how that life is presented on our screens.
KILL BILL VOL. 1, Volume 17
KILL BILL VOL. 1
Got the press kit yesterday for the DVD release of KILL BILL VOL. 1, and I couldn't be more excited than if I had received the actual platter itself. The disc hits the street on Tuesday, April 13th, with the second part appearing on the big screens shortly thereafter.
The press matter indicates that the disc does have some supplements. There's a behind the scenes featurette called "The Making of KILL BILL VOL. 1." There are also trailers for the first, second, and third film by Quentin Tarantino, plus two teasers for VOL. 1 and one for VOL. 2, plus something called a "Bootleg Trailer." And there are two music videos by the band in the film, the 5, 6, 7, 8s, for the songs "Jayne Mansfield" and "I'm Blue." That is, I assume that they are music videos. The disc will come with both DD and DTS 5.1.
Meanwhile, after I wrote about LADY SNOWBLOOD last week I stumbled upon a good survey of samurai films in an essay that accounts for changes in the genre since the '70s, and charts the afterglow of influence on other national cinemas, specifically the recent THE LAST SAMURAI.
The survey appears at Senses of Cinema.com and features an appraisal of LADY SNOWBLOOD that corrects or at least adds to some of the things I observed last week:
"LADY SNOWBLOOD (Shurayukihime, Toshiya Fujita, 1973) and its 1974 sequel reflect the various narrative and stylistic influences on the genre at the time the SWORD OF VENGEANCE pictures were in their initial release. A pre-cursor to Gosha's DEATH SHADOWS (and even Luc Besson's LA FEMME NIKITA [1990]), Yuki, the title character and "a child of the netherworlds," is born in prison and raised to avenge the murder of her family during the draft riots of 1873. As a young woman Yuki embarks on her campaign armed only with a shikomi-zue [cane sword] concealed in an umbrella, which is somewhat anachronistic in the gun-toting days of the early Meiji era. Nonetheless Yuki manages an effective vendetta. Several elements from the episodic plot to the dark glistening interiors of the women's prison and the frequent zooms into tight shots of eyes suggest the influence of Sergio Leone; but LADY SNOWBLOOD is a world removed from ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST. During her quest, she encounters a journalist (and would-be novelist) who dies helping her bring the last culprit (coincidentally his father) to justice. Despite being shot then stabbed (by the daughter of an earlier victim) and collapsing in the snow at the end of the first feature, Yuki is miraculously revived for a sequel."
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The survey is written by Alain Silver, whom I revere for his diligent work on film noir and other subjects such as David Lean and Robert Aldrich. But guess what — he hates KILL BILL! Here is what he says about the film later on in the essay:
"The most recent foray into the "samurai homage" subgenre is Quentin Tarantino's KILL BILL: VOLUME [sic] 1 (2003), which in some ways outdoes Tom Laughlin. As a noir samurai film, KILL BILL is burdened by Tarantino's usual fractured narrative and kitchen-sink approach, a grabbag from THE KILLING to the SWORD OF VENGEANCE series with a tip of the hat to Vicente Aranda's LA NOVIA ENSANGRENTADA (1972), a whole different genre, thrown in. The parody elements — from the pre-title fake "Shaw Scope" logo and "Feature Presentation Banner", scratched up as if purloined from the projection booth of some drive-in, to the extended anime sequence that fills in the back story of Oren — are purposefully over the top. The gun in the box of "Kaboom" cereal is about as deft as this movie gets, for Tarantino appears to be reaching for the American-take-on-the-samurai analogy of LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972), Wes Craven's modern-day, blood-and-guts variant on Bergman's VIRGIN SPRING (1960). The problem is that, while the exploration of a character's revenge for the death of a child, has dramatic resonance from Sweden to Japan, the chivalric code that requires and controls vengeance looks different from a 21st century perspective. Moreover, as far as disjunctive style and narrative is concerned, Japanese filmmakers have already thoroughly deconstructed the genre on their own, directly, through the ninkyo eiga, and in all manner of commercials and music videos. The use of Ennio Morricone themes and other allusions on the soundtrack notwithstanding, the saga of "The Bride with No Name" — whatever her name is, in case the audience should fail to notice, is "bleeped" out in the first sequence — is as far from Leone as it is from Gosha; and the pre-existence of KILL BILL does not create an effective link to a series figure, to Nemuri or Zato Ichi or even Crimson Bat Oichi. Any audience understands from genre expectation, if not from the existence of VOLUME 2, that the Bride who would not die in the flashback cannot die in the extended combat at the end. Possessing the same preternatural sword skills as countless samurai figures, the Bride's unbreakable blade slices through scores of blacksuited minions as easily as Itto Ogami disposed of Yagyu-clan ninja. Of course, in KILL BILL the namesake of the legendary Iga ninja, Hanzo Hattori, is an Okinawan sword-smith who makes the Bride's blade. Given this "legendary" context, even those who did not notice that Oren's name was already crossed off the list as the saga began, must certainly expect the Bride, newly spattered with the blood of others, to conquer every antagonist. Hattori's Japanese voice that coaches her at the end of the first sequence, exhorting her to "kill whoever stands in your way", has become a voice inside. But all the elements, the ninja-style concealment in the eaves, the long stretches of black-and-white photography, the young combatant spared with a Sanjuro-like admonishment, add up only to the expected result."
He goes on to extol KISS OF THE DRAGON over KB by asserting that, "The bare-handed combat after [KISS's protagonist] stumbles into a roomful of Parisian cops in white karate uniforms is closer in staging and tone to such defiant figures as Sanjuro or Itto Ogami than any scene in KILL BILL."
Only two more KILL BILL volumes to go before VOL. 2 opens!
NEXT TIME: HELLBOY and / or WALKING TALL
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