Part of The Genius and Misanthropy of Lars von Trier (Dir. #7)

Review by A.A. Dowd: One does not go to a Lars von Trier picture expecting to be dazzled. Not lately and certainly not in the traditional sense of the word. Though obviously a confident and daring formalist, one who uses the tools of his trade to reinforce larger thematic concerns, von Trier has spent the better part of his career actively eschewing the expressive/immersive qualities of narrative filmmaking. A decade ago, as one of the key figures of the Dogma 95 movement, that meant adopting a rigid gospel of guerilla-purist realism—no props, no effects, no music, nothing “artificial.” In recent years, it’s meant almost the complete opposite: a full-on embrace of the artificial, of the kind of distancing devices that instruct the viewer to step outside of a work, and to approach its content with a dispassionately critical eye. These are different approaches with different aims, yet they both speak to an avoidance of (if not a flat-out contempt for) cinema as mere sensory spectacle. Eye-candy, in other words, is not this great Dane’s specialty.

So take “Europa,” for starters, as a last splash of movie-ish movie magic from an artist who’s long since abandoned the surface pleasures of his chosen medium. Take it secondly as an early rush of cinephiliac enthusiasm, as the kind of youthful homage-art that so many great directors get out of their system while still poking around for a voice of their own. And take it, most rewardingly perhaps, as the absolute last moment that this particular provocateur privileged the exercise of aesthetic muscle over the proclamation of some damning capital-T truth. The final chapter of his first trilogy—for Lars, statements always come in threes—“Europa” unfolds like a lost gem of Golden Age genre craftsmanship, and not at all like the babysteps of modern art cinema’s bombastic bad boy supreme. This is the career that might have been had the master’s interest not shifted, swiftly and dramatically, from Carol Reed to Bertolt Brecht.

Drenched in thick shadow and glorious black & white, blanketed in snow and fog and ash and debris—like the video-store fantasylands of Tarantino or the Coen Brothers—von Trier’s postwar Deutschland is a warped expression of film-buff imagination. His plot, similarly, feels constructed from the smoldering wreckage of cinema’s art-thriller past. In the uneasy aftermath of WWII, Leopold Kessler (Jean-Marc Barr), our intrepid Yankee hero, comes to barren, battle-ravaged Germany in search of work. He’s a fish out of water—and, given the overbearing presence of the American military, a rather unpopular one—but he nevertheless succeeds in securing a position aboard the newly revived Zentropa train line. It’s here, in his capacity as an overnight engine driver, that the young man becomes useful to two opposing factions: the new German government, eager to forget the sins of the recent past and start anew, and a pro-Nazi, anti-occupation terrorist group, the Werewolves. Matters are further complicated by the growing affection between Leopold and Katharina (Barbara Sukowa), a mysterious woman whose alternately chilly and tender demeanor neatly aligns her with the Dietrich school of ambivalent femme fatales.

The weight of history, the lingering specter of war and genocide, hangs from every prickly plot point of this gangbusters genre lark. But not too heavily; von Trier, shrewdly and rather uncharacteristically, tucks his big ideas into the corners and contours of the retro-fabulous narrative. This is an exercise in fetishistic recreation, its look and feel and rhythm and content meticulously designed to mirror big movements of cinematic yore. von Trier expertly evokes the jagged lines and nightmare ambience of German expressionism, the smoky romanticism of Hollywood’s wartime noirs, and the wintry graveness of Wolfgang Staudte’s “The Murderers Are Among Us.” He plays Soderbergh’s "The Good German" number, fifteen years early and with twice the conviction.

There are shades of Hitchcock, too, in the director’s bottomless bag of astounding aesthetic tricks. Lars employs rear and front projection, distorted depth of field, extreme angles and showboating tracking shots—all, seemingly, for the kitchen-sink fun of it. Some of these hyper-stylized effects, like the superimposition of Leopold’s running frame over a giant, ticking clock, just register as silly. Others feel more pointed and poignant, as when von Trier violates his monochromatic visual palette with splashes of brilliant color, often to suggest a sudden flush of emotion in his archetypal characters. (Leopard and Katharina see each other in smitten Technicolor, and when a troubled old man takes his own life, the blood trickles down in ruby-red rivulets. They might be mere noir clichés, but they love and bleed as vibrantly as we do.) Certainly, it’s a richer use of spontaneous color than Spielberg’s ill-conceived (and severely manipulative) red dress money shot in “Schlinder’s List.”

“It’s time someone showed this country a little kindness,” Leopold dopily declares to Katharina upon his arrival in Germany. He’s one of Lars’s familiar fall guys, a wet-behind-the-ears liberal stumbling into a clusterfuck he couldn’t hope to untangle. Like the other protagonists of the Europa trilogy—not to mention Tom Edison of “Dogville” and the second incarnation of Grace in “Manderlay”—Leopold walks a road of good intentions, one headed straight for the personal hell of righteous comeuppance. By von Trier’s estimation, idealists make for lousy saviors, and you’re better off picking a side, even if it’s the wrong one, than remaining politely neutral to the fiery end. This being an LvT joint and all, it’s hard to shake the feeling that the master lecturer is somehow equating the clueless naiveté of his American everyman to that of his captive audience. (The omnipotent hypnotist narrator, voiced by none other than Max von Sydow, keeps saying “you” instead of “him,” as if he were reading aloud from an especially ominous Choose Your Own Adventure.)

And yet really this remains one of von Trier’s least didactic offerings, a fleeting flight of fancy from a filmmaker who rarely affords himself this kind of playtime. There’s no shortage of suspense or black humor, particularly in the film’s rollercoaster finale, which finds poor, put upon Leopold scrambling through a crowded, careening passenger train, dodging his superiors and racing against the clock, an unwilling puppet-saboteur in a plot bigger than himself. For once, the director favors virtuoso style over polemical substance, and the results feel about as classically satisfying as the paranoid, postwar yarns he’s mimicking. Lars would make better, richer and more important films than “Europa” in the years that followed. But none as dazzling.

Last Word: A throwback espionage noir, transmitted directly from some parallel universe where Lars von Trier is a playful aesthete and not a sternly exacting “Important Filmmaker.”

Review By:
A.A. Dowd

IN REVIEW ONLINE