Of all the filmmakers I’ve encountered on the 1001 quest, I think Lars von Trier may be the one that is always the most difficult to watch. He makes films about taboo subjects and he never pulls his punches. This trait has served him well in many cases, but I think he goes too far with his Dogme 95 debut The Idiots (1998). The film concerns a group of youthful, healthy, middle class Danes who enjoy acting mentally retarded in public. Good taste alone dictates that this film should not have been made, but von Trier has no interest in good taste. Much like his characters here, he wants his observers to feel uncomfortable.
I’ve never been a fan of directors who want me not to enjoy their films, and yet I can’t say that I’ve disliked everything I’ve seen from von Trier. I can think of only a few films that I felt less comfortable watching than his Antichrist (2009), but I really enjoyed his The Kingdom (1994; # 107), and his Breaking the Waves (1996) is a masterpiece. Like any other director, it’s expected that he’ll be hit-and-miss over a career, but von Trier’s misses are often epics of grossness and humiliation.
Here, he introduces us to Karen (Bodil Jørgensen), a lonely woman who happens upon a group of people in a restaurant who appear to be mentally handicapped. One of them drags her out of the dining room and into a cab after the maitre d' asks them to leave, and reluctantly she goes along. The tension breaks when it becomes evident that this embarrassing incident has all been an act to avoid paying the check, and that the man, Stoffer (Jens Albinus), who grabbed her is playing a gag. Karen is eventually asked to join in with Stoffer and the other friends who stay at his house who also enjoy “spassing,” as they call it.
Consisting of a series of such events, and the conversations between these spassing sessions, The Idiots is ostensibly a documentary that also includes occasional “interviews” with the members of the group. However, this pretense, and the interview segments that support it, feels to me as though it were an afterthought from von Trier, who realized how often his handheld camera revealed boom mics and crew shadows. There are those who claim that these elements are acceptable because of the film’s status as a Dogme 95 production, but those rules have always, to me, read as an excuse for shoddy filmmaking, and not as the purported “manifesto” that was eventually abandoned, even by its own creators.
There is another weakness to The Idiots as well; one that I made similar mention of in my review of Fat City (1975; #27). There I said that no film could be great if you spent much of its runtime wondering what another actor would do with one of its roles. Great films don’t allow you such thoughts because you’re too wrapped up in them to have them. Similarly, with The Idiots I spent much of the film thinking about another movie. Fight Club (1999) was, for some, the controversial film of the late 90s. Overly violent and easily imitable, that movie became the problem with millennial Hollywood. But I like Fight Club. The connection between the two films that I felt was glaring was another piece of media that reveled in bad taste, MTV’s “Jackass.” Essentially, both The Idiots and Fight Club take a 3 minute “Jackass” gag and extend it into a two hour movie. Johnny Knoxville, Bam, and Steve-O were always hurting each other and acting retarded in public, and for some reason my generation ate it up like ice cream in July.
In both Fight Club and The Idiots a group of people unable to deal with the realities of contemporary life escape into a subculture where they feel better when they pretend that something is wrong with them. They come to form a superficial family through their dysfunctions and their actions, and in both films characters begin to argue about one another’s commitment to the idea that brought them together. The difference between the two pictures comes in the fact that Fight Club attempts to explain these characters’ reasons for dissatisfaction and motivations for alternative lifestyles, where, for the most part, The Idiots leaves these questions unexplored. Its characters throw around the word “bourgeoisie” and talk about the failures of their society, but they never reach the point that the characters in Fight Club come to, in which they realize that what they truly hate is themselves.
In The Idiots only Karen’s motivations for joining the group are ever revealed, and by the time they were I’d stop caring. I’d already dismissed the characters; the same way I dismissed the guys on “Jackass.” They were immature and selfish, and while there’s nothing wrong with such characters in movies, they do need to be one of three things: a villain, a child, or a person with the potential for change. I didn’t see any potential for change in The Idiots, and thus it did nothing for me.
Language: Danish
Runtime: 117 Minutes
Available @Youtube.com
Grade: 1.5 Hats Off
0 comments:
Post a Comment