It’s a joyrider. Must be. Outside the canteen of a Copenhagen film company, there’s a screech of tyres and a blur of scarlet as a freshly waxed Alfa Romeo careers past the window, shuddering to a halt 46m from where it started. It’s the kind of car teenage boys dream about, open-top, brilliant red, more-than-faintly phallic: a car for men with a sense of flash. Or joyriders.
And out steps Lars von Trier, the 44-year-old enfant terrible of European cinema, director of such contentious landmarks as Breaking the Waves and The Idiots, “chief rabbi” of Dogme 5. Here he comes, with his DIY haircut and his shapeless T-shirt, scratching his stubble, beaming excitably.
The car’s new, says his vaguely weary assistant, a gift from a dealership in exchange for some publicity shots. So now Von Trier drives a bright red, brazenly penile Alfa Romeo convertible. The word, you feel, is incongruous. Which is also the word for his latest feature, Dancer in the Dark. Because Dancer in the Dark is hardly your average movie: in fact, it isn’t even your average Lars von Trier movie.
The story of Selma, a Czech immigrant factory worker in the midwest who escapes her epic suffering though a passion for show tunes, is a classic melodrama – an act of God here, an abject betrayal there – allied to an innovative musical, all filtered through its director’s handheld video camera.
A harrowing masterpiece with choreography by Madonna’s hoofing coach, it made me – for all the best reasons – cry. It might make you cry too.
Then again, it could make you sick. You may find Björk’s central performance heartbreaking; you may feel swindled and violated. It’s possible you’ll fall in love with it. There’s every chance you’ll really, truly hate it.
Von Trier didn’t have the Alfa Romeo when he was making it: instead, he shuttled comically around the set in his army buggy. When the time came for this year’s Cannes film festival, however, he opted for civilian transport, arriving on the Riviera in his ageing camper van.
Maybe you heard about Cannes. Maybe you heard about Von Trier winning the Palme d’Or, and the movie’s gala screening. Barely had the closing credits begun before the place erupted in ecstatic applause. Then it erupted in violent jeers. Then they just erupted together, a standing ovation with a side order of outrage. It’s that kind of film.
In his office, the Palme d’Or propped up against a sofa, we smalltalk before I tell him veteran critics who were there say they’ve never seen anything like it. His eyes light up; if anyone could ever be said to twinkle mischievously, it’s Lars von Trier. “Oh, but that is fine. I think that if people react at all, then” – he breaks out in a smirk – “you’ve reached the parts that Heineken cannot get to.”
So he wouldn’t have preferred the applause without the catcalls? “No, if it was only applause I would feel even more at the end of my career than I do already. Because the more everybody likes what you do, the less reason there is to do it. No, booing is fine. I’m quite happy with booing.”
About now you remember you’re talking to someone who once suggested a film should be “like a rock in the shoe”.
“Oh yes, I stand by that,” he says. “Except now it’s a Prozac in the shoe.”
This may ring a bell. The last time this newspaper spoke to Von Trier, he was raving over the wonder pill for alleviating his legion phobias. Two years on, he’s still smitten. “Ah, Prozac … when you break the capsule and you have the sweet powder, aaaah. Yes, I love to have some in my pocket, and pull my hand out and there’s that sweet smell.”
He stares at me, suddenly weirdly earnest. “You don’t use Prozac?” No, I don’t. He gives me the look of a man who believes it’s entirely my loss.
“Well, I’ve been taking it for several years now, and I still think it’s a good drug. I mean, before I had such anxiety that I couldn’t leave my room, and now I can even go to Cannes …” The smirk returns. “And get booed.”
It’s true: the Von Trier of old could never have handled the furore so calmly.
This time he had a different obstacle: Björk, who tried to have the screening cancelled over “musical differences” (she later won the award for best actress). In response, he called her a madwoman, a remark not untypical of their relationship. On set, so the story goes, he would cajole, she – without prior acting experience – break down; he would push, she call the lawyers.
So, Lars, let’s talk about Björk.
“Björk?” he deadpans. “Björk? I know many Björk. Do you have a specific one in mind?” Yup: the singing one. The star of your film. Björk Gudmundsdottir. “Ah, good old Gudmundsdottir! Yes, I remember.” He rubs his belly reflectively. “You know, when we were filming, it was actually quite good. As people on our way to work and from work, we had a bad time, but with the camera running, it was the closest I have been to an actor …”
There’s something else; he’s trying not to laugh. “When we were filming, I was inside her. Will you make sure to write that? I was inside her.”
Meet a man who knows journalists. But if they had such an affinity, why the arguments and tantrums? Arguments and tantrums, it should be noted, of reputedly biblical proportions. “Well, it wasn’t so much arguments, it was more that she felt the pain of the story very personally. It was like having some poor animal in a film that felt tortured just being there. And that was unpleasant, yes. The thing was, I could have taken her where she needed to go, and helped her get back, but … that never happened.”
Among the various yarns, one stands out. His eyes widen disingenuously. The costume eating? “Ah, I wasn’t there. But I understand she did harm to her costume, yes.” With her teeth? “I was not there. But I understand there was a problem with finding bits of a costume that Björk had done harm to. Off-screen.”
By now, he’s almost convulsing with the effort of keeping a straight face, the need for diplomacy. “Well, there’s no reason not to
be diplomatic. I understand her pain. But I must say, if it had been me that ate a blouse, I would be quite proud. And I’m not saying that she ate a blouse …”
He gives in, laughing hard. “But if she ate a blouse, I don’t think she would be proud. Me, if something drove me to eat a blouse, I would tell the world.”
The mood only changes when I ask what he’s learned from it all. His gaze settles on the corner of the room. “Nothing.”
His phone rings. He takes the call, talks for less than a minute, then returns to the couch. It was his wife, asking if he wants an ISDN line “so I can download filth faster”. A conversation about Internet porn ensues, none of which is strictly relevant save him feigning shock at my prudery: “Come on! You should love the Internet! The English are the filthiest people in the world.”
I try to get him back on to the film. “So yes, Björk said I was a sadistic arsehole …” Actually, I wanted to talk about its status as the most high-profile musical in decades, laden as it is with Selma’s all-singing, all-dancing reveries. Although it works because it’s played so straight, he must have seen the danger of seeming arch.
“Yes, yes, yes,” he nods. “But the genre can be so strong that you don’t need to parody it. These were films I loved as a child, but that doesn’t mean I have to distance myself from them …” The phone rings again. Flapping slightly, he curses – I think – in Danish. “So it was very important to make Selma a character people could care about,” he gabbles, lifting the receiver, “and where it was clear music was so important to her that it wouldn’t seem artificial … Hello?”
There’s another hiatus. Afterwards, he unplugs the phone. “Something about the kids. As someone with four, I must tell you that if you have them one by one, it’s very nice. Otherwise, you must be the policeman, which is not particularly interesting or we would have been policemen, wouldn’t we?”
Childhood and parenting: familiar ground for Von Trier. Anyone sceptical of Dancer in the Dark’s ripened melodrama would surely blanch at its director’s biography. First came the upbringing by stalwart communists, left wholly free of adult interference (the inspiration, he says, for most of his phobias).
Then the clincher: his mother’s deathbed confession in 1995 that her late husband was not his biological father. He met the real thing four times before the old man cut off contact. Within a year, Von Trier left his first wife, converted to Catholicism (hitherto believing he was Jewish), and made Breaking the Waves, the film which began his departure from the polite sensibilities of his early career (dazzlingly unhinged hospital soap The Kingdom notwithstanding).
Now he lives in the suburbs with his second wife and is, by all accounts – except perhaps Björk’s – a model of adjustment. He peers at his feet. “You know, it’s an interesting power, your upbringing. Of course, family is important, but we should also remember it is the root of conflict. We have this craving for a home, this animal urge you can’t control in an intellectual way, and while you can be logical and …” He looks up, genuinely puzzled.
“Why am I trying to be clever about this? Ask me about the film.”
So I do: specifically, I ask about the controversy that follows his career like a lost dog. For every viewer who found the sexual
extremities of Breaking the Waves redemptive, someone else was walking out in dumbstruck horror; The Idiots, meanwhile, dealt with physical handicap and erections. And now there’s Dancer in the Dark, already condemned as emotional pornography (actually, that was one of Björk’s).
For the only time while I’m with him, he seems indifferent. “Yeah. OK. People can say that. Of course, in truth, I’m a poor softie …”
Only he’s not a softie to those vexed by what they see as the hallmark of his last three films: sacrificial women. His expression hovers somewhere indefinite. “Ah, I never knew the word.” Misogyny? “Right. And precisely it means …?” Hating women. “Uh-huh. OK.” He gives the matter what looks like serious thought. “No, I don’t think there’s hatred.” Now there’s a glint in his eye. “I mean, firstly my mother was a woman …” And did you like your mother, Lars? I’m expecting a punchline. Instead, his brow furrows.
“I don’t know if … I respected her very much. Liked her, yeah, I suppose. I mean, it wasn’t an uncomplicated relationship. But I don’t think these are representatives of real women. They’re characters from my own female side. And hating or belittling women, that’s not my intention. I see them as the stronger sex, because they’re unpredictable.”
Panic spreads across his face. “That does sound belittling.” He holds his head in his hands. “I’m sorry … oh, wouldn’t life be better if it was just men and the Internet?” And then he smiles and says, “I think she won.” Who? Björk? “Yes. I think she won. I remember telling someone in my family about her, and they were saying, “Oh Lars, how terrible”, and then they saw the film and said, “Shame on you!” And I said what? And they said, “Shame on you! This woman is a saint. A saint!”
Speaking of which, how’s the Catholicism working out? He screws up his nose. “Oh, it’s not. I don’t know, it seems like this God wants us to kneel. Which I don’t find logical. I mean, if his creation is so great, why does he want us on our knees? I’m sure I’ll be punished in the afterlife for saying that. Or no,” – there’s some hardcore twinkling going on – “And shame on you! Of course, Björk will have some studio there, with her rappers running around. And I’ll say, OK, I’ll take hell instead.”
Grinning the same artless grin he wore when he first walked in, Von Trier gestures through his office window, on into the outside world. “And in the meantime, I have this fantastic car. What more could I want?”