Cast: Bodil Jørgensen, Jens Albinus, Anne Louise Hassing
Director: Lars von Trier
Screenplay: Lars von Trier
Studio: Zentropa Entertainment
Runtime: 117 mins
Genre: Foreign/Drama
Country: Denmark
It's always awe-inspiring when somebody in this earthbound existence steps up and does something completely out of the ordinary. Although Danish filmmaker-cum-provocateur Lars von Trier isn't relatively new to behaving like a wild child of world cinema today (if you're uninitiated to the von Trier canon, try seeing either Breaking the Waves or Dancer in the Dark, but for your good life's sake not simultaneously together, you'll be gagging for a strong swig of whiskey afterwards to send all the gloom and bitterness down from the back of your throat to the pit of your stomach), during his Dogme 95 manifesto-toting early days, he was a revolutionist, a trailblazer of pure, challenging cinema. A plumpy, Eastern European version of Jean-Luc Godard minus the signature Raybans and cigarette questioning every single Hollywood convention and advocating tenets of credible, intelligent filmmaking. The year 1998 saw this said cinematic revolution. Cannes was invaded by the Danes, with two liberal-minded films Dogme #1: Festen and Dogme #2: Idioterne. Two films that defied hard-fast rules of established cinematic techniques, observational works that employed lo-fi, home-video aesthetic, naturalistic use of setting and sound, and engaged with improvised performances. Realism, meanwhile, is the ultimate goal.
Yet despite sounding so simple ('Hookay, let's grab a videocam and start filming, dude!'), von Trier's entry to the "Vow of Chastity" aka the Manifesto, The Idiots, is far from simple. It's an elaborate, maddening, challenging piece of work. The title points to a gang of middle-class malcontents, educated and crucially aware of the zeitgeist, masquerading as an institution of the mentally handicapped. With intention and full recognition of their actions, they take the piss on society and its norms, and pull pranks on anyone as they drool and dribble and convulse their way through restaurants, pubs, streets and public swimming pools - and then retreat to their suburban estate like post-modern hippies, disdainfully sniggering at society's pathetic reactions to the handicapped
. It's without a doubt a provoking concept for a film, as we viewers laugh at the pranks pulled at the beginning, cringe at the crew's deliberate social experiments halfway and then later compel us to recheck society's inherent revulsion to anything abnormal.
Von Trier seems determined to suggest the poser here, what is normality? In the freewheeling attempts of the group, we see a dark mirror of the bourgeois superiority complex, patronising those that commit unruly social behaviours whilst this pack of anarchists feel much more superior about their actions in return. Normality is this group's number one enemy, as they all disregard etiquette and common decency, shredding clothes in public and even an explicit gang-bang sex with full-on, brief, upfront, pornographic penetration. Don't watch this with your puritanical grandma, she might die of heart attack. All of this is observed using scattershot camera, with a fragmented storyline that that shifts gear from one situation to the next, conveying a pseudo-reality show feel. But the laughs completely dissipate when the band is visited by Down's Syndrome patients, where the leader of the pack, charismatic yet nihilistic Stoffer, is appalled by the genuine innocence and twitchiness of the patients - a reaction that turns out exactly akin to those oblivious people they take the piss on. From then on, the foundation soon starts to crumble, and they begin to question themselves and their purpose. That they're nothing more but a group of social misfits who couldn't function in the so-called normal environment, and their spassing is their way to be involved in something, to be noticed, even in sheer disgust.
The Idiots, despite a difficult viewing experience, reveals some devastating truths and emotional cruelty of humanity, themes that would recur in many of von Trier's later works, most especially Dogville and Dancer in the Dark, in which the films' heroines are subjected to forms of social and psychological punishments. And here, we witness this in Karen, the newest member of the gang, whose transformation from a shy middle-aged wallflower to a willing saviour of the group's final degeneration by volunteering to 'spass' in household environment is developed to a heart-wrenching effect. There's a riveting final shot that will have you either fuming in anger or sobbing your eyes between your clenched hands, depending on your emotional capacity.
The cinematic equivalent of a knife in your gut. The Idiots is altogether a complex, maddening, devastating, kaleidoscopic one-of-a-kind viewing experience. Compared to its more triumphant film-brother Festen, this is an underrated Dogme 95 work that lobs a searing, scathing critique to society, Hollywood and sanitised audience expectations.
Review by The Moviejerk © Janz
