He is terrified of flying, and not too fond of ferries either, but when the maverick director Lars von Trier makes enemies, he’s not afraid to pick on the biggest bully in the playground.
The controversial auteur is squaring up to the US with a trilogy of films that is being seen as a damning indictment of the American way.
The first film, Dogville, in which Nicole Kidman plays a woman put through the wringer in a small town in the Rockies during the prohibition era, is already the talk of the Cannes film festival though it will not be premiered until next week. Based on the Bertolt Brecht song Pirate Jenny, it is being interpreted as an allegorical warning to America, over its war on terrorism, that it will reap what it sows.
Von Trier infuriated American critics here three years ago when he drove home to Denmark in his camper van with the Palme d’Or award for Dancer In The Dark, his unsettling musical about an innocent immigrant, played by the singer Bjork, who is sent to the scaffold.
Some US critics were irritated at von Trier’s handling of such a prickly political issue. In a calculated slight to them and to Hollywood — which von Trier accuses of making films about other countries with little regard to their sensitivities — not one of the new trilogy, which all star Kidman, is to be shot in the US.
Von Trier said: ”All my life I have been critical of American society… I haven’t been there but my perception of the US is based on a lot more information and images than the Americans had when they made the film about Hans Christian Andersen — the US is a much bigger part of my consciousness than Denmark ever was to the people who made that film.
”As a young man I was a communist and I still feel that I belong on some sort of left wing. I don’t believe that American society is very nice to people who don’t have much — to put it nicely.”
Dogville was shot on a set in Copenhagen, having been inspired by Trevor Nunn’s TV film of his Nicholas Nickleby for the Royal Shakespeare Company, in which actors talked directly to camera. The story, however, has grittier origins in the song of Pirate Jenny in The Threepenny Opera, with the conclusion that US dominance comes at a price.
In the final verse of the song that Brecht wrote with Kurt Weill in 1928, Jenny tells the pirates to kill all those who treated her like dirt when she was scrubbing floors. ”Then they’ll pile up the bodies/And I’ll say,/’That’ll learn ya!”’
Von Trier told the Danish journal Film: ”In one way [Dogville] is critical of the US, but at the same time not, because its similarities to today’s Danish politics are striking. There are also parallels with the war with Iraq, which wasn’t intended but it is something I am very much against. I’m ashamed of the Danish participation. I have no sympathy or respect for this war.”
Although there had been dark mutterings of an American boycott of Cannes over France’s rejectionist stance on the war with Iraq, Americans are not staying away. However, several of the big names who regularly grace the Croisette are absent: the Coen brothers, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Altman had apparently not finished their films.
The actress Meg Ryan and director Steven Soderbergh, who are both on the jury, dismissed talk of political pressure to stay away.
Von Trier has thrived on conflict. He has often been accused of misogyny for putting actresses through hell: the atmosphere on the set of his film Breaking the Waves earned the movie the sobriquet Breaking the Wives. – Guardian Unlimited Â