MANDERLAY - FILMSTRUCK

This review was originally written for DVDTalk.com in 2006.

In 2003, Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier began a daring film trilogy exploring the political mythology of the United States of America. A work of Brechtian agitprop, Dogville was an exciting parable that illuminated and baffled in equal measures. Many were angered that a European director who impishly admitted to having never visited American shores would make such a hypercritical film about the country; others found the harsh honesty refreshing. Last year, von Trier released part two, Manderlay, and while its meaning might be a little more clear, it's likely destined to be just as hotly debated.

Bryce Dallas Howard (The Lady in the Water) plays Grace, the reluctant daughter of a ruthless gangster. In Dogville, the role was filled by Nicole Kidman, who had to bow out of Manderlay due to a schedule conflict. As much as I love Nicole Kidman, the change ends up being a lucky turn for von Trier. Howard brings a different kind of physical power to the character, one that is well suited to Grace's current state of mind. In Dogville, Grace humbly submitted herself to the cruelty of her fellow man in an attempt to atone for her father's sins. Kidman gave her a quiet air of shame that made it believable for Grace to continue trusting the citizens of Dogville even after they turned against her and exploited her time and again. Howard picks up Grace after the good people of small-town Dogville, a sort of Depression-era Anytown U.S.A., have broken her. She is now more action oriented, ready to do good rather than just be good, and she's no longer afraid of harsh tactics. At the same time, Howard gives Grace an added naïveté. Her guilt has taken a more liberal bend, and the trust that remains is now given to the downtrodden.

The change in lead actresses adds to the formalist experiment of the trilogy. Like its predecessor, Manderlay has a style of transparency. Rather than build fancy sets to portray the southern plantation of the story, von Trier has shot his film on an open soundstage. Lines on the floor mark where walls are, and only the most essential of props are given to the actors. Doors and running water are all pantomimed. It creates an air of unreality that reminds the audience that Manderlay is allegory, while also stripping away all distraction. Instead of focusing on the beauty of the art direction, as one might if Grace were talking to the plantation's workers in front of a glorious mansion, the audience has no choice but to focus entirely on what is being said. Adding to the sense of parable is John Hurt's wry narrative. Speaking in a slightly sinister voice, he delivers ironic jabs when von Trier needs to put a finer point on the events of the narrative.

And the narrative is one of considerable power. Grace and her father (now played by Willem Dafoe instead of James Caan) are traveling across the map (literally) in search of a town suitable for reestablishing their criminal enterprise. At one stop in Alabama, a woman runs out of a rich estate to ask for help. A man inside, Timothy (Isaach De Bankolé, Miami Vice), is about to be whipped under the false accusation that he stole a bottle of wine. When Grace and daddy's hoodlums intercede, she discovers that Manderlay is a remote plantation that has never heard of the Emancipation Proclamation. When Grace confronts Manderlay's matriarch, Mam (the legendary Lauren Bacall, who played a different character in Dogville), the old woman is overcome with the shock of it. On her deathbed, she begs Grace to burn a book hidden in the room, and Grace refuses, choosing instead to let Mam's shame outlive her.

It is with this sort of bleeding-heart hubris that Grace plows forward, freeing the slaves of Manderlay. With the help of the house servant, Wilhelm (Danny Glover), and keeping a few of her gun-toting crew on hand for good measure (including Udo Kier and Jeremy Davies, both also from Dogville, though only Kier was in the same role), Grace establishes a new community on the plantation. Before he leaves, her father warns her that freedom is not so easy to come by, that oppression always finds its way back, but Grace doesn't heed his warning.

Point of fact, Grace ignores a lot of warnings over the course of Manderlay. If she believed everyone would live up to their word in Dogville, now she seems to think by refusing to listen to anyone, she can make her own word come alive. For instance, the book Mam is so desperate to see destroyed contains all the laws with which she governed Manderlay and ranks each slave on a number system meant to mark them by their various personalities. Just as Grace is cautioned that it will, this book brings about many troubles, including some of the surprising shocks of the film's climax.

von Trier is fearless in Manderlay. He's not willing to make an easy or safe film about the politics of race. Rather, he's made something that is dirty and complicated that doesn't shy away from historical stereotypes, duck uncomfortable language, or create any angelic figures to stand apart from the rest and lead everyone down the right path. While he has given Manderlay an American context, his real stock-in-trade in this trilogy is human nature. His morality plays are set in small towns, and thus they represent life in microcosm. The new community on the plantation is not idyllic, but instead is subject to individual error, selfishness, and the problems that any group of people might encounter when thrust into a way of life they are not used to. A lot of the choices they have to make may seem wrong, including ones that allowed for their pre-Civil War state of being to be preserved, but what von Trier is posing is that what seems so obviously correct from the outside is not always so easy on the inside. His willingness to be messy is a welcome relief after Hollywood's self-satisfied back-patting at this year's Oscars--an event that itself answers why it took a European director to make something like Manderlay. Unlike Crash, there are no magic twists of fate to pull people out their own myopic worldview, and not everyone is really noble-hearted deep down. Manderlay doesn't make us feel good about ourselves and fool us into thinking we're more progressive than we really are, and Grace's liberal guilt in action skewers such self-importance quite savagely. Hurt's voiceover jabs turn into a straight punch in the gut when he delivers his final thought, followed by the same kind of photo montage that ended Dogville, once more cut to David Bowie's "Young Americans."

At the close of Manderlay, Grace is lost in the wilderness. She is horrified by what she has witnessed, though it remains to be seen if she has yet realized her own complicity in it all. (The former slaves surely have, given the position they have attempted to put her in.) Given the marked turn the climax of Dogville drove Grace to, we can bet that she won't be the same person when Washington* comes out next year as she was when Manderlay's credits rolled. Lars von Trier is 2/3 of his way to a masterpiece, though, so I for one can't wait to see where his misguided heroine ends up.

* It should be noted that the third film never got made, and doesn't seem likely to happen anytime soon.

SIDELINE: MORE REVIEWS FOR 10-11/11

Wow, I have been so out of it in November, I never even posted a list of movies I reviewed in October! My apologies for being drag-ass this past month, it's been a weird time. I am getting on track, though, and hope to catch up through December.

In the meantime, my non-Criterion movies...

IN THEATRES...

* The Big Year, it's called birding, not birdwatching, and it's awful either way. Wilson, Black, Martin--the new comedy nightmare team.

* The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, a documentary showing a certain portion of history through a different lens.

* The Descendants, George Clooney starring in a new film from Alexander Payne.

* The Ides of March, a political drama from he-that-can-do-no-wrong, George Clooney. Starring Ryan Gosling.

* Into the Abyss, Werner Herzog's documentary on the death penalty in Texas. Very human, very scary.

* J. Edgar, Clint Eastwood continues his trend of almost delivering in this biopic with Leonardo DiCaprio as the legendary lawman.

* Like Crazy, love a la modern cinema verite. Starring Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones.

* Melancholia, Kirsten Dunst at the end of the world, courtesy of Lars von Trier.

* The Mill and the Cross, Rutger Hauer stars as Pieter Bruegel preparing his painting The Procession to Calvary in Lech Majewski's deconstruction of the masterpiece.

* Restless, Gus Van Sant's latest attempt to go back to high school. Insert words "emo" and "twee" now.

* The Rum Diary, Bruce Robinson returns to moviemaking for a somewhat disappointing Hunter S. Thompson movie with Johnny Depp.

* The Skin I Live In, the disturbing new horror drama from Pedro Almodovar.

* Take Shelter, the movie where Michael Shannon goes crazy and the world seemingly follows his lead.

ON DVD/BD...

* Bad Teacher: Unrated Edition, a superb cast can't prevent this from being one of the least funny movies you'll see this (or any) year.

* Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest, the story about the influential rap group is also the best music documentary in a long, long time.

* Bellflower, the cult indie strikes me as empty for all the wrong reasons.


* Bored to Death: The Complete Second Season, the continuing adventures of Jason Schwarztman as the pulpy, humorous avatar of author Jonathan Ames.

* Buster Keaton - Short Films Collection: 1920-1923, 19 comedy gems on three discs.

* Cape Fear, Scorsese's potent remake with Robert De Niro and Nick Nolte.

* Dumbo: The 70th Anniversary Edition, the stellar new upgrade for the little elephant that could.

* Great Italian Directors Collection, a boxed set of three films, including the first by Antonioni, a mid-60s Monicelli, and the anthology film Boccaccio '70.

* His Way, a breezy documentary about music promoter/movie producer Jerry Weintraub.

* I'm a Cyborg, But Thats OK, an inconsistent oddity from Park Chan-wook.

* Miss Nobody, an indie black comedy starring Leslie Bibb.

* My Fair Lady, another Audrey Hepburn movie comes to Blu-Ray. (What is that? Three now? Hurry up, Hollywood!)

* Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, a black action comedy. The true Santa Claus returns!

* Rescue Me: The Sixth Season and the Last Season, the fire fighter bromance ends.

* Tomorrow is Forever, a post-war snooze with Orson Welles and Claudette Colbert doing their best to be mellow in all the drama.

* True Adolescents, a surprising indie comedy starring Mark Duplass as the cliche 30s rocker on his last legs.

* Water for Elephants, a film even a pachyderm would endeavor to forget.

* The White Bus, a short film written by the recently deceased Shelagh Delaney and directed by Lindsay Anderson.

Lindsay Anderson directing

ANTICHRIST (Blu-Ray) - #542

Lars von Trier, how do you do this to me? And why? I can't think of a single filmmaker whose films I admire this much but that I have to gear myself up to watch. Knowing what a difficult, provocative director you can be, and advance word that your new movie Antichrist was extremely harsh, I prepared myself as best I could. It wasn't enough.

Francois Truffaut had a theory that a viewer was not properly prepared to critique a film until he or she has seen in three or four times. I would agree with that in the case of Antichrist. There is a lot to sort through here. Unfortunately, I'd be lucky to sit through the movie a second time without closing my eyes at crucial moments, much less give it a third or fourth viewing. This is a movie that is profoundly unsettling by design. It is erotically charged, graphically violent, visually creepy, and disturbing in its philosophy. I can't say I loved it, I am too nauseous, but I am astonished by it. It's incredible work from von Trier, who is easily one of the most challenging filmmakers working today. He is perhaps best known for Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Dogville--all films that feature a female protagonist that must in some way contend with madness, be it personal or societal. Antichrist boldly continues this tradition.

The story is simple enough to set up: a married couple, known only as "He" and "She" and played with unflinching resolve by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, lose their son when he falls out the window while they are having sex. The woman is overcome by grief, and when all her doctor does is try to medicate her pain away, the husband takes over her treatment. He is a therapist by profession, and he believes human emotion, no matter how tragic, must be explored. Realizing that the symbol of his wife's greatest anxiety is the forest cabin where she spent her last summer with their son, he takes her up there to make her face her fears head-on. The cabin is in a part of the woods referred to as Eden. Obviously, paradise this is not.

Almost immediately upon arriving in Eden, the man starts seeing the woman's madness manifest, though he's not aware that's what he is witnessing. Nature itself is reacting to her, and he is witness to sights both grotesque and ominous, some of it perfectly natural, some of it more mystically symbolic. Alone in their cabin, they ride the stages of her mourning together--she can turn cruel or horny or depressed in a heartbeat, and the film is split into three states: grief, pain, and despair--until the weirdness becomes too overwhelming and the full insanity is unleashed.

Antichrist is sure to stir up debate. The film opens with an explicit sex scene, one of many, and its climax is full of upsetting images of very real violence, including genital mutilation. Lars von Trier understands the power of both things, and Antichrist requires a balance between them. Were he to shy away from either, the impact would be lessened. The violence is sexual, the sex is violent, the physical punishment is an exertion of control on an out-of-control world. I can't even imagine what the actors must have subjected themselves to in order to give von Trier what he wanted. Both Defoe and Gainsbourg are remarkably real and frighteningly honest on screen. If they were any less, this movie would not be so excruciating. Cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, who is a regular von Trier collaborator and who put the gloss on the dross that was Slumdog Millionaire, captures an environment that is quite beautiful, even when it is sickening. Images of death and decay are just as lush and colorful as the life that thrives all around. Profound nightmares are enacted with a dreamy sort of peace. In this, I see parallels with the on-Earth scenes in Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris. von Trier dedicates Antichrist to his former mentor, and from that venerated filmmaker, the Danish director has learned to demand patience both of himself and his audience.

The extremes of Antichrist are purposeful, this is not just shock for shock's sake. Lars von Trier is definitely saying something with this movie, though I am not sure everyone will agree on what that is. The writer/director has been charged with misogyny before, and Antichrist has him in hot water again, even winning a special anti-prize at Cannes. I've always found his portrayals of women to be sympathetic and, in their way, empowering. Dogville, for instance, ends with Nicole Kidman's character punishing those who had wronged her. Though many may argue that von Trier's ruthless portrayal of all those misdeeds is suggestive of diseased motives on his part, it's not a label I'm willing to hang on him. Nor am I willing to do be so quick to judge here. I think Willem Dafoe's reaction to his wife's revelations are key in interpreting the piece overall. She is a woman who has studied the history of violence against her gender, and her belief that maybe this is deserved, that there is something uncontrollable about women that must be contained, is not just a symbol of the madness she suffers, but a product of that abuse. Like a self-punishing version of Stockholm Syndrome that casts history as the captor.

More than the Tarkovsky influence, I actually see Ingmar Bergman's fingerprints all over Antichrist. You wouldn't have to work too hard to con me into thinking this was one of his unproduced scripts. Like von Trier, Bergman always wrestled with spirituality. In their films, mankind wants there to be something greater but fears that there is nothing to be had. Nature serves as a stand-in for God, a force that operates without our input or understanding. The division between our social constructs and our base nature is tragically thin, and efforts to contain either will be fruitless. Willem Dafoe's character is the one who sees all of the supernatural visions in Eden, yet he makes no effort to engage with or understand them. His mantra for his wife is that she should not attempt to explain the irrational, just let it happen. In this way, he may be more ill than her, possessed of a kind of cultural disorder that keeps him outside of the deeper experience and in turn pushes her further into the insanity. He is outside of nature, she is within it, even subject to it. When the woman's prophecies about the "Three Beggars" come true, manifesting as a deer, a fox, and a crow, he can only say they don't exist. This leaves us to ponder what we have seen, as well. He embodies a white knight syndrome that says a woman's problems are fixable, and his drive to compartmentalize her anguish turns her into a male nightmare, the crazed female who will do everything to prevent you from leaving her.

Does this make the woman more knowable, even if her behavior is harder to understand, just because she is more open to feel and to expressing those feelings? Antichrist is ambiguous to be sure, and von Trier isn't above punching a few volatile buttons. That title alone is meant to provoke and will likely be central to any arguments that the movie is misogynist. (Though, as Roger Ebert reminds us, the literal translation of the original term is "opposed to Christ," and so a being devoid of goodness rather than a theological opposite; religion doesn't even really come up in the context of the movie.) The final image of the movie doesn't help either. It's one of the things that haunts me the most about the film, even more than the brutality. How you interpret that scene, whether you see what arrives as coming to positively reclaim their own or to destroy what has created them all, is going to be crucial to how you ultimately feel about Antichrist. Regardless, it is not a film you will soon forget.

I recommend Antichrist highly, but I do recommend it with caution. The squeamish will not fare well watching it, and it may be a strange movie to screen with a member of the opposite sex, particularly one you care about. (If someone takes you to this on a first date, don't agree to a second.) It's a film I liked, and one I'll like talking and reading about, but not one I particularly liked watching.

In fact, I chickened out with how I watched the movie this time, now that I've seen it on Blu-Ray. The above were my first impressions, written when I saw the theatrical release...goodness, it was over a year ago. I had no idea it was that long. The wounds were still fresh, and though I was going to try to pull the wool here and make an excuse about how my second impression of the movie is fueled by the conversations I have had since, and so the best way to go about it a second time was by furthering that conversation, it would be a crock. I just wasn't ready to watch the film on its face, so instead I let others lead the way. Namely, I viewed it while listening to the audio commentary with Lars von Trier and film professor Murray Smith.

It's not an approach that lacks merit. I am seeking out a fundamental understanding of what von Trier was after with Antichrist. I had hoped for more from him on the commentary, and Smith does try to engage him in a dialogue about the things that inform his script, but von Trier is, not surprisingly, recalcitrant. He is more open about discussing the technical aspects of what was achieved instead of the why of the story. Part of that is natural, I get the sense that he is an intuitive artist who trusts his impulses without having to attach an explanation to them. Another part, and probably the main reason, is revealed in the closing portion of the movie, when Murray asks him what seems to be obvious, if the finale was meant to be ambiguous. von Trier says that in Antichrist, more than any of his other films, he pushed himself to be more mysterious. I would suppose, then, he must leave the movie unexplained; now that it's out there, it's not his mystery to expose.

Film scholar Ian Christie, on the other hand, is an expert detective, and his dissection of the film in the booklet that accompanies the Criterion release is well worth diving into. His theories on the title are particularly interesting. I won't give them here, go and read for yourself. There are also multiple interview selections on the disc that help in terms of exposing the story behind the production to a fuller degree.

Antichrist, as von Trier does explain in the commentary (as I said, there is much discussion of technical filmmaking), was shot with the Red digital camera. This makes the movie particularly suitable for High-Definition, and the transfer on the Blu-Ray is remarkable. Every blade of grass is sharply rendered, each has its own particular green. The optical effects really come alive, the way the story bends under Charlotte Gainsbourg's gaze, the intentional artificiality of the "magic," and the antiseptic black-and-white of the prologue and epilogue are given an increased visual potency in this format. Every gory detail is there to be seen, fulfilling von Trier's goal that there would be nowhere for the viewer to avoid the harsh particulars of his fictional reality. Say whatever else you want about it, but Antichrist on Blu-Ray looks phenomenal.

This disc was provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

SIDELINE: MORE REVIEWS FOR 10/09

IN THEATRES...

* Amelia, Mira Nair's biopic of Amelia Earhart is an emotionless snoozer. Starring Hilary Swank.

* Antichrist, the new Lars von Trier philosophical shocker is one of the most unsettling movies I have ever seen. Not for the faint of heart or the quick to judge.

* Astro Boy, a cool looking movie that is stuck somewhere between the quality of the original material and a misguided desire to satisfy the kiddie market.

* Coco Before Chanel, starring Audrey Tautou as the fashion designer in her formative years.

* A Serious Man, the new Coen Bros. mind blower. I know everyone has seen the trailer, but I am including it above just because it's one of the best ever. And best of all? It tells you NOTHING!

* No Impact Man, a documentary about Colin Beavan and his family, who tried an experiment of living off only sustainable resources for a full year.

* Where the Wild Things Are will make you believe in the impossible in every way.

ON DVD...

* Actors & Sin, a slick entertainment-themed double-bill from Ben Hecht.

* British Cinema: Renown Pictures Crime & Noir (Blackout, Bond of Fear, Home To Danger, Meet Mr. Callaghan, No Trace, Recoil), collecting six films from the 1950s, none of them very good.

* Luis Bunuel's Death in the Garden, a 1950s potboiler from the surrealist director's Mexican period.

* Diary for My Children (Napio gyermekeimnek), a 1984 film from Hungarian writer/director Márta Mészáros is a personal portrait that is maybe too personal to effectively communicate its tale.

* Il Divo, a flashy Italian biopic of politician Giulio Andreotti.

* Fados, Carlos Saura's performance documentary on a particular style of songcraft from Portugal. Lots of songs, very little information.

* Lightning Strikes Twice, King Vidor's mild melodrama about women who fall for the wrong men.

* Management, in which Steve Zahn stalks Jennifer Aniston and they call it a "romantic comedy." Both terms are almost entirely wrong, though there are glimmers of quality.

* My Fair Lady, the Audrey Hepburn musical is reissued and downgraded. Keep your old DVDs, they are better.

* Whatever Works, the Woody Allen/Larry David movie comes to DVD, and I revisit my old review from its theatrical run.

EUROPA - #454

Before Lars von Trier was part of the Dogme 95 movement, living by an avant-garde manifesto that was meant to chip away the artifice of filmmaking and adhere closer to the grittiness of real life, he was actually working on the opposite end of the spectrum. His early films were visually exciting, inventive, and challenging flights of imagination. This includes his 1991 post-War mindbender Europa (a.k.a. Zentropa), a Kafka-esque espionage adventure that tunnels its way into the bleakness of occupied Germany. Bureaucratic nightmares, rickety technology, false identities, and questionable allegiances all converge for a paranoid thriller that has as much to do with the treacherous landscape of the mind as it does our treacherous perceptions of history.

Leopold Tressler (Jean-Marc Barr) is an American sent to Frankfurt in October of 1945 to work alongside his Uncle (Ernst-Hugo Järegard) for the Zentropa Train Company. Leopold is to be a sleeping-car conductor, a clever symbol for the hypnotic journey he will soon be taking. His very occupation is that of ferrying passengers from one place to the next while they sleep. So, too, could all of Europa be a dream. We enter the movie under cover of night, a single light illuminating the train tracks that our eyes scan as the narrative voice of Max von Sydow plants the hypnotic suggestion that will transport us to Germany alongside Leopold.

Immediately upon landing at Zentropa, Leopold discovers a near impenetrable corporate system full of rules, regulations, and many a wheel that needs greasing just to get him started working. Each door he steps through requires another qualification, each person he meets further complicates the situation. Sometimes these discoveries seem part of a larger plot, sometimes they are simply extraneous wrinkles designed to push our hero further into the mire. He meets the Hartmann's, owners and operators of Zentropa--the weary father Max (Jorgen Reenberg), the gay son Lawrence (Udo Kier), and the mysterious daughter Katharina (Barbara Sukowa). Katharina first comes to Leopold on the train, claiming a fear of traveling through tunnels (paging Dr. Freud!), but then invites him over to dinner at the house, where she starts to peel away the layers of her outward persona. Katharina may have at one time been a member of the Werewolves, an insurgency of Germans trying to foil the American efforts to govern their country. Just as he is a man torn between his home country and his ethnic heritage, so is Leopold caught between the politics of a defeated Germany and the restoration/reformation efforts of the Allies. He witnesses a farce organized by the U.S. military leader Colonel Harris (Eddie Constantine) to exonerate Max Hartmann of any Nazi connections, but he is also duped by the Werewolves into making an assassination in the sleeping car possible. Leopold is so tangled up in this intrigue, he doesn't know whether he is coming or going.

Most of Europa is shot in black-and-white, evoking spy movies of the period, from Fritz Lang's pre-War homeland efforts to Orson Welles vehicles like Journey into Fear. Lars von Trier also uses exaggerated rear projection and subtle splashes of color, creating an effect that is a little something like Guy Maddin visiting Sin City. Red drops of blood tumble through gray baths, while characters flush in emotion suddenly become fully rendered in painterly hues amidst the otherwise two-tone world. The construction of images only adds to the paranoia. von Trier's version of a split-screen phone call puts Leopold in the left part of the screen, in the active/present moment, while Katharina's face is enlarged to take up the entire right side of the screen, appearing as a rear-projected image. When the phone conversation is over, Leopold hangs up the phone and moves out of frame, revealing the werewolf blackmailer (Henning Jensen) listening in, always watching, preying on Katharina in order to force Leopold into committing terrorism.

Europa is surreal in all things: technique, logic, and construction. von Trier's shooting style goes hand in hand with how the story develops, and the world that production designer Henning Bahs builds for Leopold to traverse gives it all shape. The Germany of Europa is like a wasteland, with bombed-out buildings sitting alongside labyrinthine constructs like the Zentropa worker's barracks. Interiors feel desolate, disconnected from the outside world by their decoration, at once looking like movie sets as well as the nightmarish, man-made products of war. In many ways, with the way his camera's movements homage Hitchcock and his audaciousness prefigures Baz Lurhmann, Lars von Trier is drawing a connection between the proliferation of pop culture--specifically, our obsession with movies--and our own interior anxieties. Our anguish over past misdeeds (the Nazis and World War II) comes cloaked in the iconography of old motion pictures, and these cloak-and-dagger images also bring up the lingering anxiousness of the Cold War and a fear of the unstoppable momentum of technological progress. Leopold is both a man of the world, fancying himself able to straddle two cultures, and an outsider, belonging nowhere, just as the 1990s were moving toward mass globalization where individual cultural identities were being celebrated even as the machine gobbled them up. And this was pre-Quentin Tarantino, before talking in pop cultural buzz phrases became de rigueur.

Within these echoes of movies past is Leopold's desire to belong, as well as his romantic yearnings. Katharina captures his heart even as she demands his trust. Here the "Werewolves" name is revealed to me more clever than maybe was immediately apparent: as a lover, Katharina is asking the same questions that one would ask as a monster or as a terrorist. Do you trust me not to hurt you? A commitment in any relationship begins with this question, whether it is articulated or not. And in movie fantasies, getting the girl and saving the day and coming out unscathed are all the same goal. The sticky web of romance and the sticky web of international intrigue? As Humphrey Bogart taught us, it's all the same thing.

Of course, Bogie wouldn't be as out of his element as Leopold is. The lie of the movie fantasy is that we'd be more confident in the midst of the concocted plot than we would be were it happening to us in real life. Leopold never knows what to do, is indecisive, and is subject to the caprice of those who would use him to their own ends. Caught between his desires and various regimented moralities, none of which seem right, Leopold could become hopelessly lost. To push the movie metaphor further, Katharina chastises him by saying that since he was not actually in the war, he is not really in a position to judge those who were. He hasn't lived it, he has only observed from afar, so how could he possibly understand what any of this means?

It's this accusation that pushes Leopold toward his final decision and puts the climax of Europa into motion. Leopold simultaneously becomes the voyeur and the man of action. In the foreground, he appears in color with a rifle; in the background, the black-and-white insertion of his own eyes watching him. I seem to recall similar eyeball imagery in Steven Soderbergh's Kafka (and, of course, Hitchcock's Spellbound), but in the explosive finish of von Trier's movie, he is evoking Orson Welles' movie of The Trial more than Franz Kafka's original novel. Welles removed a layer of humanity by blowing up Anthony Perkins, whereas Kafka gave his Joseph K. a death by human hands. von Trier goes one better by moving outside of the train and leaving it ambiguous as to whether Leopold finally did act or not. Was what happened intentional, or was it an accident? The final piece of the dream, the MacGuffin of the mental sphere, is snatched from us. The hypnotist returns, but he tells us we will not wake up from this. It's the big sleep, as it were.

Despite Lars von Trier's reputation as a difficult director, the refreshing thing about Europa's meta-narrative is that von Trier never steps so far beyond his audience that he looks back to smugly admire the intellectual distance that he has put between himself and the viewer. Rather, by wrapping this unconventional story in conventional trappings, he has created a comfortable zone for the viewers to appreciate what he is doing. The toys are familiar even if the playground is not. Thus, though Europa picks at our brain and challenges us to find our way through its maze, the way it keeps us guessing like any other wartime mystery doesn't make the puzzle-solving daunting. Rather, like the true masters of suspense, the pleasure is in the pondering, and thus it's all the more fitting that the entirety of the movie takes place all within the viewer's mind. A filmmaker is nothing but a hypnotist, after all, lulling you into a state where you believe that what you are seeing is real. (All the more fitting that von Triers' Hitchcockian cameo is as the lying Jewish collaborator who falsely exonerates Max.) To provoke, to intrigue, these are von Trier's goals, and though he would employ harsher methods in the years to come, Europa is no less stunning for the ease with which it goes down.

For a full rundown on the special features, read the full article at DVD Talk.