Showing posts with label Nikolaj Lie Kaas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nikolaj Lie Kaas. Show all posts

Wednesday 22 May 2013

The Idiots



Lars von Trier’s The Idiots is my first encounter with a Dogme 95 film. Dogme 95 was an avant-garde filmmaking movement, begun in 1995 that saw a group of Danish directors release a manifesto of rules by which their films would be produced. The basis of the rules were to strip filmmaking back to its traditional values of story, acting and theme and forbade the likes of artificial lighting, music, additional props and special effects and had specific rules based around how and where a film was shot. The minimalist and realist films which were created saw their director go uncredited and often their cast and crew unpaid. The Idiots was von Trier’s first Dogme film and the second overall.

Perhaps somewhat predictably for Lars von Trier, The Idiots is a film that was marred in controversy. The controversy came from two aspects of the film. The first was the plot which revolves around a group of anti-bourgeois Danes who sometimes pretend to have mental disabilities in public. They refer to this as ‘spassing’ and are often both convincing and cruel in their depictions. The second controversial aspect of the movie is the graphic sex and nudity. For a director whose next film is to be called Nymphomaniac, this might not be surprising but The Idiots contains scenes of both male arousal and full vaginal intercourse, the likes of which I’ve never seen in a narrative film.