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Nicole Kidman (right) stars with Paul Bettany in Dogville.
The trailblazing Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier (Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark), has inspired a new generation of filmmakers who prefer to work outside the mainstream. Always interesting to watch in his own right, von Trier has now broken yet new ground with Dogville, toying again with the medium of film and coming up with something altogether new.
Long a proponent and practitioner of the raw immediacy of an unplugged, stripped down approach to moviemaking, in Dogville, von Trier opts instead to create a deliberately false environment to create a studied emotional distance between the story and its audience.
To evoke the barrenness of Dogville, a remote Depression Era mining town in the Rockies, von Trier has opted first to blanch the screen of misc en scene. He opts instead for a bare soundstage with a chalk footprint of a Main Street standing in for the real thing. Further adding more layers of artifice, von Trier relies little on props and uses sound effects to suggest the crunching of leaves, the barking of dogs, the approach of a car, etc.
The camera itself is an altogether separate character in the film, too. Close-ups are unnaturally static, claustrophobic and often uncomfortably overlong. At other times, the camera hangs all the way back or peers down from above, at a remove. Furthermore, von Trier employs an ensemble of players, primarily rejecting the Hollywood convention of using lead actors and supporting players (with one important exception).
In Dogville, von Trier’s decision to hire big name stars and reduce most of them to subordinate roles in the story creates even more of an emotional distance between the audience and story. A conventional, familiar manufactured film world, again, would make you feel at home. In Dogville, you’re never supposed to feel at home.
The film’s lone main character is the aptly-named, Grace, who attempts to take refuge in Dogville while fleeing gangsters. Resident idealist, Tom Edison, convinces a reluctant Dogville to shelter Grace, urging the townspeople to view their acceptance of her as a spiritual opportunity, of sorts. With skepticism, they acquiesce. At Tom’s urging, Grace works to ingratiate herself with his fellow residents, offering various housecleaning and caretaker duties in exchange for them allowing her to stay on. Little by little, Grace, seemingly goodness itself, slowly charms the town’s residents.
But, like a dog itself can turn, the rabidly insular and suspicious town turns on Grace as various sinister outside parties return to Dogville to search for her. As outside pressure mounts, Dogville begins to exact more severe, and downright degrading, forms of payment from their ‘guest,’ reducing her to the role of an indentured servant and prostitute.
Unflinchingly grim, Dogville is by no means a perfect film. At 173 minutes, it is also overlong. Von Trier is more than somewhat overconfident in the power of what is, after all, not a overwhelmingly complex story to absorb. Nonetheless, the power of a story is in its telling and Von Trier, here, has achieved perhaps his most successful balance between story and style, to date. Although the iconoclastic von Trier would probably love to prove genre-resistant, Dogville’s brand of creeping dread vaguely echoes the warped sensibility of Roman Polanski and Stanley Kubrick.
Primarily, however, von Trier pretty much remains in a class by himself, surrounded now by filmmakers he himself is influencing.
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