[rating=3]

The game of 'tag' got quite rowdy by the end...

A Group of Copenhagen Outcasts Act Like Idiots to Make a Point…

The Plot: Karen (Bodil Jorgensen) witnesses a mentally challenged man (Jens Albinus) attempt to eat in a restaurant, causing havoc. She feels sorry for him, helps him out, only to find out that he’s totally sane, his name is Stoffer, and he is part of a clan who act like they’re mentally challenged to embrace their ‘inner idiots’, and to oppose society. Their goal is to cause anarchy wherever they go, and to provoke people to react to them.

It’s funny that one of the rules of the Dogme vow of chastity is that the director’s name has to remain uncredited, considering Lars Von Trier, the Danish director who came up with the manifesto (along with Thomas Vinterberg) had his second project vainly titled “Lars Von Trier’s Epidemic”. Yet that was back in ’87, times have changed, and now the man came out with a set of very specific rules. Some projects ended up more successful than others; “The Idiots” is in the above-average category. It has a lot of potential, but sadly Von Trier wastes the opportunity to tie it all together into a coherent whole. That’s not to say that the film is bad -it’s so good, in fact, that it’s more of a shame it doesn’t live up to its five-star potential.

“The Idiots” starts off on a high note, its introduction effective – it intrigues with the premise, and the pseudo-documentary approach complements the story. Realism is important when it comes to sensitive subjects; Lars Von Trier’s film deals with mental retardation head-on, and if it were made in a glossy Hollywood fashion it might have come off as offensive. The Dogme style adds poignancy to certain scenes, suggesting we’re spying on real life instead of witnessing someone’s fictionalized account. The gritty DV approach, no camera trickery, a complete absence of your standard action sequences, and no artificial lighting in any scene: all of that adds to the effect of watching something real.

It’s almost Hitchcockian how the Danish director manipulates his audience by raising contradicting emotions. First, we feel awkward throughout the restaurant scene, because we relate with the woman who has to take care of her partner. Then the director pulls the rug from under our feet – it’s all a gimmick, he’s not really mentally retarded – our emotions get stirred. Are we supposed to be creeped out by the cult-like group of people who terrorize society? Ashamed for their detachment from reality, their ignorance? Relate to their pledge to find happiness in the utter blankness of the mind, when one gives in to their ‘inner idiot’ and ‘spasses out’ (sorta like giving the finger to contemporary middle-class society)?

Therein also lies the problem. At one point, when the group frightens the lady about to purchase the house where they commune, I found myself angry, not at them, but at the filmmaker for being so repetitive in the message he’s hammering into our heads. At this point, all those emotions the film stirred up initially quickly start morphing into a simple ‘I don’t care much anymore, not for the characters, and not for the pretentiousness of this project’. What started off as a good premise turns out to be more-or-less a one-joke film.

And that’s too bad, considering the first-rate work of the actors, the success of the film’s style, the promising beginning, and last but not least, the director, who manages to pepper his film with enough nuance and subtlety amongst the sermonizing to ensure that the film is always fascinating, even at its most annoying.

One of the rules of dogme is to not have a genre, yet I believe that Von Trier is an auteur, and the theme of criticizing modern society runs through the majority of his films (which I’m hesitant to define as ‘dramas’ – dogme films can’t have a “genre” after all). The director’s best film is “Breaking the Waves”, which came out a year before “The Idiots”. It has Dogme characteristics, yet strays away from the restrictions of that style a little bit, therefore giving Von Trier more freedom to focus on inspired characterization rather than screaming out the point he’s trying to make at his audience. By the end of “The Idiots”, you’ll feel enlightened, but you’ll also feel like wearing ear-muffs.