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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
If von Trier were simply making the point that the victimized often become victimizers, trite as that is, it would be hard to argue with him. But Grace is fulfilled by becoming the bloodthirsty vengeance demon she turns into in the film's climax -- just as Emily Watson's and Bjork's characters were fulfilled by being murdered and executed. Essentially, von Trier's worldview is no different than that of the most macho pulp writer: In his world, it's kill or be killed. And it doesn't much matter who does the killing and who does the dying because, for von Trier, we are all rotten at the core.
He may find all human beings equally despicable, but that doesn't mean that they suffer equally in his films. Women are von Trier's select victims. That alone doesn't make him a misogynist. What does make him a misogynist is the sadistic relish he takes in the drawn-out destruction of his female characters, which we see as if watching flies having their wings pulled off under a microscope.
Because of the style in which "Dogville" has been shot -- entirely on an indoor soundstage, with chalk outlines on the floor standing in for buildings, and sound effects for things like closing doors -- the actors mime many of their actions. But damned if Nicole Kidman doesn't actually have that concrete weight manacled to her neck. In a von Trier movie, how could it be otherwise?
The director's supporters have tried to explain away the treatment of women in his movies by invoking spiritual or political themes -- "Breaking the Waves" was about the quest for salvation and the sacrifices we make for love; "Dancer in the Dark" was a protest against capital punishment and so forth. But Bjork's execution in "Dancer in the Dark" went on for an obscene amount of time. And long after we've gotten the point in "Dogville," Kidman is still being raped and abused. No matter what point he is allegedly making, we are still watching the protracted depiction of women being raped and killed and otherwise abused.
Speaking about the control he requires of actors in a recent interview, von Trier said, "This is why I work so often with females. To give up control you have to trust somebody, and it's easier for me to convince females to do this, for some reason." He doesn't convince them for long, however. Has anyone noticed that actresses tend to get the hell away from von Trier after working with him? Following "Dancer in the Dark" Bjork announced that it was such a miserable experience she would never act again. And Nicole Kidman (citing scheduling conflicts) has pulled out of the next two films in the projected trilogy.
Given that style, "Dogville" is essentially a filmed stage show -- a bad piece of '30s avant-garde theater, to be specific. But the "open" stage plan serves a metaphoric meaning. That the worst takes place in plain view of everyone else (imaginary walls or no) is meant to implicate all the characters equally in every horrible act. Everyone is guilty (which, of course, means no one is).
Von Trier has borrowed both from Friedrich Durrenmatt's play "The Visit" and from Thornton Wilder's "Our Town." John Hurt narrates the film in a voice as dry as a corn husk, though with just enough vinegar to make it clear that the homiletics his lines consist of are intended as a parody of the narrator in Wilder's play. It's easy to see that von Trier would have contempt for as sweet and loving and achingly poignant a vision of American small-town life as "Our Town." He wants to expose Wilder's vision as a lie.
But von Trier, in whom the dunderheaded and the heavy-handed meet, also misses what's great about his darker source. In "The Visit," a fabulously wealthy woman returns to the impoverished town she left in disgrace years before and offers the townspeople a million dollars to kill the man who wronged her. Durrenmatt's writing is sharp and uncompromised and also very funny. The fabular elements have a pointed playfulness to them. Durrenmatt presents the most appalling things with a fleet absurdity. "The Visit" moves swiftly and surprisingly to its climax. Von Trier grinds away at each instance of cruelty and hypocrisy like someone screwing a cigarette butt into an ashtray long after it's gone dead.
And he means to be just that numbingly insistent. Von Trier is fully in command of his effects and his meanings. The imaginary sets of "Dogville" may be the opposite of what the Dogme 95 manifesto, which von Trier co-signed, mandated (shooting with a hand-held camera on location in direct sound, no special effects or lighting, and so forth). But the effect is of the same malnourished purity as the Dogme films. This is moviemaking as penance for the filmmaker and punishment for the audience.
