CANNES, France -- Near the end of my interview with Lars von Trier, I asked if he was trolling women in his latest, The House That Jack Built. He said he didn't know what trolling meant, so I explained, even as I wondered if he was feigning ignorance and actually trolling me. It felt fitting. The Danish director -- whose movie, an exercise in the cinema of cruelty and tedium, is screening out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival and has become, unsurprisingly, his newest scandal -- has long relied on provocation to unsettle viewers with movies like Breaking the Waves, Dogville and Nymphomaniac.
The surprise is that von Trier is at Cannes at all, having been banned by the festival in 2011. That year, at the news conference for Melancholia -- his brilliant, deeply felt movie about the end of the world or at least one woman -- von Trier blurted out that he was a Nazi. Seated next to a soon-squirming Kirsten Dunst, he took a question about his German roots, the gothic and the Nazi aesthetic. Von Trier started to talk and then he began to babble, finally ending this excruciating spectacle with a little laugh and the disastrous words: "OK, I'm a Nazi."
After that incident, von Trier issued an apology, or his publicist did, only to later say he wasn't sorry, after all. Cannes declared him persona non grata until the festival added The House That Jack Built to this year's lineup. Now he blames the moderator at that news conference. The moderator should have asked him what he meant, von Trier told me Tuesday, when we met at a villa where he's staying. If he could have explained, he said, "nothing would have happened." It was hard to tell if he was serious. "My problem," von Trier added, "is really that I'm a crowd-pleaser."
He also told me that at the 2011 news conference he was "trying to be funny," which I believe because he likes to use mordant humor even when deploying horrific shocks, skittering between pleasure and pain, beauty and ugliness. The humor doesn't always translate, however, and neither do his artistic ideas. In Jack, he tries to engage the audience by outraging it and, more interestingly, to say something about art. But he's also making you suffer with gore and monotony. At the Monday-night premiere, attendees stood and delivered the requisite festival ovation alongside rows of empty seats.
Violence and especially violence against women runs through von Trier's movies (whipping, rape, death), which often involve some kind of redemption. He doesn't believe that Jack -- which contains grim, exceedingly unpleasant-to-watch images (human taxidermy, torture, mutilation, murder) -- represents a shift in his approach. "I always thought that everything that can be thought or done should be shown," von Trier said. "Because why not?" At least within the law, he added when prodded. Even so, "in principle, I mean, also if it was against the law because I'm very much against censorship and I'm very much against political correctness."
When I asked what he meant by political correctness, he said "Sweden." It was a glib, amusing response, but when I asked why he cares what anyone thinks, he didn't directly answer. (Later, he said that he didn't care about the audience, which I don't believe, and that "I am the audience.") Instead, he offered an example: "In Germany, of course, it's against the law to be a Nazi," von Trier said, which isn't true in Denmark. "We have a poor little Nazi party that everybody can see is no threat to anybody and are just a bunch of nutheads running around." It would be "much more problematic if you had a law against" being a Nazi.
"It's a bad thing for democracy every time you say, 'You can't say Negro,' you know," he said, adding, "It's a wrong way to go about it. Of course you wouldn't say something to people who don't want to hear stuff. But to make it a law is I think wrong and not practical."
Von Trier's use of the word "Negro" threw me. I wondered if he meant an uglier word. He was unfailingly polite, but I felt as if I were pushing against a shifting, slippery wall of sand. So I just asked if he wanted total freedom. Yes, he answered.
Discussions about censorship often lead to an impasse, and of course much depends on who is doing the banning and for what reasons. Old Hollywood banned certain representations as did the Soviet Union. Censorship is used to grab and maintain power, and to silence opposition. Yet when I pointed out the obvious to von Trier -- that it's easier for the powerful, even a privileged filmmaker such as he, to say everything should be permitted, and that the powerless of course are already often voiceless and struggle to be heard -- we reached another impasse.
The House That Jack Built itself too often feels like a dead end. It's formally divided into five murderous "incidents," which involve Jack (Matt Dillon) slaughtering mostly women and a few children and men. Every so often he chats with Verge, as in Virgil (Bruno Ganz), who largely remains off-screen. Jack also makes classic von Trier deadpan observations meant to elicit laughs. "I'd like to see a police badge," one female victim tells Jack, who's impersonating a cop to get into her house. "As would I," he answers not long before strangling her to death.
As to why von Trier wanted to tell this story, he said only that "my technique is that I take a genre and I make it collide with something else." In this case the genre is the serial killer drama. "For me, it was interesting if the mass killer had a -- maybe not 'intelligent,' but anyway, a human side also." What he wants to do is make people think about it, though he remained vague on what we're to think about. "It could be anything," he said. "You know, just the action to rise and walk out must have been some thinking."
He has a long history of forcing people out of their seats at Cannes. The problem is that shock can become rote, and in Jack he risks turning the audience off with brutality, sluggish pacing and repetition.
Certainly while I was watching Jack, I wondered if von Trier weren't just testing our patience but punishing us, as it were, because of previous complaints about his work. As if he were saying, "You thought the genital mutilation in Antichrist was bad, well, I'll show you violence!" Except that this movie only comes to life when von Trier seems to be speaking through Jack, especially in his jousting dialogues with Verge, and in one relatively compact section when the talk turns to German dive bombers; a form of fungus that affects wine grapes called "noble rot"; despots as icons (Mao, Stalin and Hitler); and the Blake poems "The Tyger" and "The Lamb."
Is it Jack talking, or von Trier?
"It is a mixture, all the way," von Trier said. "And maybe I'm a little tough on myself," he added. "But I could -- if I had chosen another path in my education -- I could have been Jack, right?" I said that I hoped not.
MovieStyle on 05/18/2018