THE IDIOTS (70) (second viewing: 53)

Directed by: Lars Von Trier

Starring: Bodil Jorgensen, Jens Albinus, Anna Louise Hassing

The Pitch: A bunch of well-off young people like to crash public places pretending to be mentally handicapped, sowing chaos and forcing Society to confront its hypocrisy.

Theo Sez: Not just impossible to separate this from its "Dogma 95" genesis, but actually wrong : indeed, it fits so perfectly with its back-story one wouldn't be surprised to learn Von Trier had dreamed up the whole Dogma business just for the purposes of this one movie - even though, intriguingly enough, the two seem to be at cross-purposes. Its heroes are totally Dogmatic, vowing (like Von Trier and Co.) to do away with artifice, make things uncomfortably raw, jolt viewers (of their antics) out of their complacency, go unabashedly "back to basics"- back to the essence of humanity, drooling like infants and shouting their emotions ; yet the point, despite their lofty proclamations, seems to be that they're just rich kids playing at anarchy, their "anti-bourgeois ideology" merely a facade, easily dropped whenever jobs or families are threatened. Only one of the group manages to use Idiocy creatively, the only one who's poor, who questions the wisdom of shock-value for its own sake and (above all) who has genuine grief to exorcise - spelling out the message that shocking people is easy, but it takes pain to create Art. Indeed, as in BREAKING THE WAVES, pain seems to be at the centre of Von Trier's work, his relentless camera style battering away at emotions (notably in the great final sequence which, though unresolved, is what ties the film together) ; the whole thing is a kind of elaborate tease, daring us not to be seduced by its giddying style and jittery rhythms, to appreciate what lies beyond - a call for emotional engagement on the most basic level. Taking the handicapped as a shorthand for absolute purity, it savages the hypocrisy of politically-correct "compassion" for them (pointing out the unspoken not-in-my-back-yard proviso) and, by extension, the impure kind of art - sentimental rot like THE EIGHTH DAY - which patronises them, makes them "cute" and meaningless : they are in fact a salvation, as mystical and unknowable as Bess' private religion in WAVES, a cleansing white light for us to aim towards. The film isn't just a provocation but about provocation - about going all the way, in Art as well as Life, going beyond surfaces and games and (yes) ideologies to a core of raw emotion ; it's a little strident and one-note, but among the most personal films in ages. And the least dogmatic. [Second viewing, 20 years later - and reading the above actually makes me like it a little more (kudos, 1998 self), but it still seemed quite boring this time. The final sequence is indeed important but a bit contrived; oddly, the scene that worked best for me was Katrine 'spazzing' at the business meeting while pretending to be the client, which would get Axel in trouble with his bosses if they realised the deception - because there's something at stake for once, not just conceptual comedy and perfunctory soul-searching over what looks more like performance art than a true provocation. The fact that the film is aware of this hollowness, and indeed makes it part of its plot, helps a little, but also makes it seem even more conceptual.]