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DOGVILLE
CONFESSIONS
5/10
Dogs
and Deer : Denmark 2003 : Sami Martin SAIF : 52 mins
“When people
around me have it bad, I have it better than ever.”
Lars von Trier, interview with Danish radio, 7th Sept. 2002.*
Dogville
Confessions is a documentary about Lars von Trier and the making of
Dogville. Or should
that be “Lars von Trier and the un-making of Dogville”? Or perhaps
“Dogville and the un-making of Lars von Trier”? In fact, ‘un-masking’
would be a more accurate term. Because anyone watching Dogville Confessions
‘blind’, knowing nothing about von Trier, would surely be amazed that
this man is so often described as one of current worldwide arthouse cinema’s
most eminent and accomplished figures.
And they’d
probably be staggered to discover he was named Best European Director
for Dogville at the 2003 European Film Awards – ahead of Michael
Winterbottom (In this World),
Wolfgang Becker (Good Bye,
Lenin!), Isabel Coixet (My
Life Without Me), Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Distant) and Marco
Tullio Giordana (The Best of Youth). If Dogville did deserve
a prize for directing, meanwhile, on this evidence von Trier should split
it with his leading lady, Nicole Kidman, whose wide experience of moviemaking
proves crucial during those numerous on-set occasions when her so-called
“director” loses his way.
To say the
least, von Trier emerges from Dogville Confessions somewhat badly.
Watching Saif’s documentary it’s surprising that Dogville was even
completed at all, so unsteady was von Trier’s hand on the tiller. Working
with by far his starriest cast ever, the director seems visibly unnerved
by the presence of Kidman, Paul Bettany, Ben Gazzara, Philip Baker Hall
and, most of all, Lauren Bacall, who so awes the director that he’s constantly
scurrying off in search of his preferred sedative, Valium. Bacall, meanwhile,
seems understandably bemused by the half-arsed goings-on in the Swedish
sound-stage where Dogville was filmed. She’s too much of a pro
to make a fuss, but her facial expressions say it all: “It was never like
this with Mr Hawks or Mr Huston!”
Dogville
Confessions recalls the legendary documentary supposedly shot by Max
Von Sydow’s wife on the set of Minority
Report, which apparently shows Steven Spielberg in a less than
flattering light. But whereas the Von Sydow footage has never been properly
circulated, Dogville Confessions is the ‘official’ making-of film,
and, while it won’t be commercially released, is proving a popular one-off
item for arthouses and festivals. Von Trier presumably approves – then
again, he does seem to operate on the basis that all publicity is good
publicity, and that everything he does is part of some vast, post-modern
cosmic joke he’s perpetrating against Cinema in general and the ‘director-as-star’
phenomenon in particular. “Any reasonably producer would have put the
brakes on long ago,” he muses, “but apparently not…”
As Dogville
is such an experimental production, perhaps one shouldn’t judge von
Trier too harshly. But the director seems to approach the whole creative
process as a series of daft pranks and games. Watching his movies (especially
his hilarious masterpiece, Dancer
in the Dark) many viewers will be tempted to agree. But when his
script calls for a harrowing rape-scene, von Trier’s gigglingly childish
manner seems grotesquely tasteless, even perhaps imbecilic: the audience
is grateful when he’s politely reined-in by Kidman, whose own approach
to the sequence is rather more mature, since her character is the one
who’s being violated.
There are many
such embarrassing/piercing/enthralling/informative moments in Dogville
Confessions, but the documentary is nevertheless a frustratingly missed
opportunity. The big gimmick is that von Trier installed a Big Brother-style
‘diary room’ in a corner of the set where his actors could go and blow
off steam. We get tantalisingly brief clips from the resulting footage
– with Bettany especially impatient of von Trier’s - and it does seem
that all the really ‘good stuff’ has been left out.
Instead, director
Saif indulges some ill-advised ‘arty’ interludes in which a spectral deer
is seen walking through the set (often to the accompaniment of noodlingly
‘atmospheric’ muzak), or an unidentified, silhouetted figure – clearly
von Trier himself – is shown viciously denouncing von Trier as a fraud.
A little of this goes a very long way, especially when we could be
seeing more of the fascinating on-set footage, or more of the video-room
‘confessions’. Dogville Confessions could and should have been
considerably longer: which is cruelly ironic, considering how drastically
the 3-hour Dogville outstays its welcome.
25th
December, 2003
(seen on VHS, Sunderland, 9th December 2003 – thanks to Fusun Eriksen)
* Lars
von Trier : interviews (ed. Jan Lumholdt, University Press of
Mississippi, 2003) p170
by Neil
Young
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