Dogville

Lars von Trier is known for his peculiarity and as a die-hard experimentalist of modern cinema. Dogville brings to the plate just that. It is disturbing, the kind of film you either love it or hate it. Nicole Kidman, in one of her more stellar performances, portrays Grace, a ravishingly beautiful blonde doggedly pursued by mobsters. She bumps her way into a dead-end town under the Rocky Mt. named Dogville. As a fugitive and possibly someone on the wrong side of the law, the honest folks of Dogville greet her with great suspicion. She is granted two weeks of probationary stay and she labors herself to win the approval of the town. Happy times are cut short by repeated visits of the police. People of Dogville consider the risk too high and after deliberations, they reckon it's only fair to ask for a premium. Grace starts to work longer hours with less pay. Then abject humiliation and harassment are thrown in as a total package. After a failed escape, things get real ugly. Chained down like a dog, Grace is turned into a sex slave. It's, to say the least, extremely harrowing. But we wouldn't expect anything less from Trier.

The first scene begs difference from average cinema. There's barely any scenery. Starting with a bird's eye view, we see the doomed town with its plot laid out by chalk lines in a soundstage. Houses are stripped bare of walls except where it's neccessary to show their original purposes, e.g. the town bell, and the shopping window of a small shop. The characters are thus exposed to our naked eyes and so are their lies, cruelty, and bitterness. Later when Grace is raped by Chuck in his "transparent" shack, the townsmen's (or our) nonchalance to violence and injustice is more than graphically illustrated.

The central character is a self-proclaimed aspiring writer who barely writes anything at all, but in an attempt to find excuses for his less than productive writing endeavour he takes it upon himself to hold moral rearmament meetings for his fellow townsmen at the mission house. The unexpected arrival of Grace provides him with the "illustration" for his moral lessons he so desperately needs. He coaxes Dogville into accepting Grace, and that makes him giddy with accomplishment and self-satisfaction. But there's no genuine compassion for the weak. Everybody wants something from Grace, or just about anybody else. No one in this wretched little town is innocent, including the kids. It seems like Lars von Trier has this deep sense of disillusionment with humanity that he has finally had enough. In Breaking the Waves, Bess forgives and endures in order to redeem the soul of her husband. Grace, as we know by the last chapter of Dogville, also believes in forgiveness but this time, she concludes it's a losing game after all. It's not fear, despair, betrayal, pain, indignity or suffering, but grave disappointment that drives Grace to torch Dogville to the ground. She witnesses human souls, like the glassware Mr Henson grinded so thin, shatter into smithereens by their own weight. Her observation leads to a series of revelations which culminate in a violent ending. Violence, as suggested, is the only way to rip open the hypocrisy people rely on to hide their fraility. Both Grace and Bess, and even Selma in Dancer in the Dark, believe in sufferance and forgiveness, and thus have this air of religious martyrs or messengers from some higher powers about them ( even the name Grace is ominous). But this time, judgment has passed.

Some American critics lash the film from the angle of anti-Americanism, which is arrogance in grand display, the same thing Grace and her mobster father accuse each other of at the end of the film. Unembellished arrogance. The story may take place in America but the theme is universal. There's a bit of the Lord of the Flies in it that the real problem of human being comes from surviving each other, not unpredictable natural calamities. Kidman shines, and so is the ensemble cast. Paul Bettany is very convincing as the chicken-feet, pedantic opportunist, and the guest appearance of James Caan is delightful. Dogville isn't for eveyone, but I enjoy the mix of novel production, brilliant performance, old-fashioned melodrama and the unabashed critizisim on human nature.