PROFILE: LARS VON TRIER:The Danish director's stark, uncompromising style of filmmaking has divided audiences, and his latest film, with its graphic violence and genital mutilation, won't quell accusations of cruelty and misogyny
IN THE introduction to a 1997 documentary
Tranceformer: A Portrait of Lars von Trier
, Lars Von Trier smirks into the camera in the opening shot and announces, “I’ll gladly assert that everything said or written about me is a lie.” This is textbook Von Trier, contradictory and combative but also, according to a former filmschool friend, a “playful rascal”. There is no doubting Von Trier’s credentials as film-maker, but they are almost outstripped by his skills as a self-publicist. His latest film,
Antichrist
, is released next Friday and has been grabbing fat column inches since its debut at the Cannes Film Festival this year. There, critics were divided. Some laughed, some booed, many walked out and there were rumoured faintings.
But Von Trier's work has always had an uncompromising quality. His modus operandi is, to put it mildly, extreme in a career that has seen him both fêted as a genius and scoffed at for pretension and misogyny. As an individual, he is as hugely paradoxical as his work. A year before making Breaking the Waves, he outlined his Dogme 95 philosophy of film-making. This demanded that all filming should take place on location, using hand-held cameras, with no lighting, a basic budget and that it should be unsigned (ie have no credits).
The film adheres to most of this, except that it is introduced as “A Film by Lars Von Trier”. Contradicting his own manifesto is one thing, but to open with an act of vanity seems quite at odds with Dogme, yet typical of Von Trier the artist.
Born in 1956 to Communist parents with a penchant for nudism, Lars Trier grew up in a household that was emotionally repressed yet lacked behavioural boundaries. His parents were Jewish, but Von Trier now refers to them as atheists.
After receiving a Super 8 camera as a present, he made his first film aged 11. At Danish Film School from 1979 to 1983, he picked up the nickname "Von Trier" and adopted it as a tribute to silent filmstar Erich von Stroheim and Austrian director Josef von Sternberg. His first major film post-graduation was The Element of Crime, about a detective trying to solve the murders of young girls. It was the first in his Europe trilogy, with the second, Epidemic, following in 1986.
The latter film is rooted very much in his own experience as an extreme phobic. As well as being prone to agoraphobia, he has a fear of flying, underground structures, illness and hospitals. The latter two dominate Epidemic, a film within film about a doctor attempting to stamp out an epidemic. The trilogy ends with Europa(1991), set in post-second World War Germany. As a child, Von Trier's favourite book was Gold Heart,a title he was to borrow for his trilogy that comprised Breaking the Waves, The Idiotsand Dancer in the Dark. It tells the story of a young girl who lives in a forest. One day she leaves her wood cabin, gives away all of her belongings and ends up naked and alone. The picturebook has a happy ending (with a Prince, of course), but the last pages of the young Lars's copy was missing, so his version was a desolate one which offered little hope. Von Trier has revealed that it partly inspired Breaking the Waves, but it's a vision that is common in much of his work.
IN 1995, while working on his Dogme manifesto and preparing to shoot Breaking the Waves, his dying mother summoned him to her deathbed. There, she revealed that another man – her old boss who she considered to have "artistic genes" – was actually his father. Father and son had several fraught meetings, with Von Trier ending up ultimately rejected.
The Freudian nightmares of his own life seem to have provided ample material for his films, but fatherhood is not examined in nearly as much detail as the mother’s role. Von Trier doesn’t shirk from excoriating women at every opportunity and he has been able to convince some very talented actresses to portray his damaged women with intuitive brilliance.
In Dancer in the Dark, which won the Palme D'Or at Cannes, singer Björk plays a simpleton who is manipulated and cheated to the point where an audience almost can't bear to watch. Emily Watson's turn as a dutiful wife who prostitutes herself to fulfil her paralysed husband's fantasies invoked the wrath of feminists. It won her an Academy Award nomination and Breaking the Wavespicked up the Grand Prix at Cannes.
His next major work was The Idiots; in the interim period, Von Trier's personal life had experienced much upheaval. He left his wife Cæcilia Holbek, who was pregnant with their second child, for their babysitter, who he subsequently married and has two further children with. The Idiots, about a group of people engaged in self-discovery by pretending to be mentally disabled, provoked a storm of controversy from various groups and catcalls of "Il est merde!" from BBC film critic Mark Kermode at a Cannes screening, which he was thrown out of.
IN HIS NATIVEDenmark the director has been involved in several TV shows as a writer. Most notable among them is his supernatural hospital drama, Riget("The Kingdom"), which ran for two series in the mid-1990s. Set in a modern, pristine hospital, it features phantom ambulances and was compared to cult TV classic Twin Peaks. It was later reworked for US TV with script input from Stephen King, but failed to win viewers.
Another Von Trier anomaly is the fact that he has never set foot in America (due to his fear of flying), despite setting his ongoing USA: Land of Opportunitiestrilogy in the country that is home to Hollywood. Nicole Kidman starred in the first film, Dogville, playing yet another of the director's troubled female characters. On set the pair had several clashes, but Kidman has previously said she would finish the trilogy. She was absent from 2005's Manderlayand it's not known if she will star in the final film Washington, pencilled in for a 2010 release.
Von Trier demands a lot of his actors and Björk famously vowed that she would never act again after her experiences with him on Dancer in the Dark.
Like his childhood book Gold Heart, Von Trier's latest film, the controversial Antichrist, also features a cabin and a naked female engaged in self-sacrifice. It introduces us to a couple whose toddler son dies in a fall from a window. Shattered by grief and guilt, they attempt to pick up the pieces by retreating to a forest cabin.
The mother, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, is encouraged by therapist partner Willem Dafoe to ditch her medication and give herself over to his therapeutic care.
What happens then is actually summed up by, er, a talking fox who stops briefly chewing his own flesh to tell us that “Chaos reigns”. The film offers real sex, violence, mental breakdown and the death of a child, culminating in the ultimate taboo shot of female genital mutilation. It is unstintingly grim and a film to be endured rather than enjoyed. No surprise then that Von Trier admits he wrote it while recovering from a severe bout of depression.
His unflinching attitude to sexuality extends outside of the realm of narrative film – a subsidiary of his Zentropa production company was once responsible for making hardcore porn films. Called Puzzy Power, it was spearheaded by a group of women to produce erotic films for women.
Despite the overlap of issues and motifs in his work, he can never be accused of making the same film twice, tackling various genres (another Dogme 95 no-no) including horror ( Antichrist) and musical ( Dancer in the Dark). He is enigmatic and perplexing as ever, and his work almost revels in its own divisiveness. If you momentarily park the graphic sex, violence and mutilation, Antichriststill has multiple flaws.
None of this matters to Von Trier. At a Cannes press conference, the Dane was unrepentant about the film. “I am the best director in the world . . . and I don’t have to justify myself.”
CV LARS VON TRIER
Who is he?A Danish film director known for his controversial and uncompromising work.
Why is he in the news?His film Antichrist – featuring real sex, female genital mutilation and violence – opens here next Friday.
Most appealing characteristic:He's provocative and true to his art.
Least appealing characteristic:His questionable misogyny towards female characters.
Most likely to say:"I'm the best director in the world, me."
Least likely to say:"I've always wanted to make a Hollywood-style romantic comedy."
