Lars Von Trier

6.0 Medea (1987)
7.8 Europa/ Zentropa (1991)
8.4 Riget/ Kingdom (1994)
7.5 Breaking The Waves (1996)
6.5 Riget/ Kingdom II (1998)
7.0 Idioterne/The Idiots (1998)
7.0 Dancer In The Dark (2000)
7.3 Dogville (2003)
6.5 Manderlay (2005)
6.7 The Boss of It All (2006)
6.8 Antichrist (2009)
7.4 Melancholia (2011)
4.5 Nymphomaniac - Volume II (2013)
5.0 Nymphomaniac Volume 1 (2013)
5.9 The House That Jack Built (2018)

Links:

(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)

Danish director Lars Von Trier (1959) debuted with Forbrydelsens Element/ Element of Crime (1984) and Epidemic (1987).

Medea (1987), based on an un-produced script by Carl Theodor Dreyer, is a drama of cruelty, which Von Trier sets in a bleak landscape, constantly swept by the wind and shot with feverish hand. In Von Trier's hand, the ancient Greek myth becomes a psychological nightmare.

(Translated from my original Italian text by Sebastian Radzikowski)

Medea is lying on the beach with her face to the sky (the shot is filmed from the sky). The camera and the earth class=GramE>begins to rotate, as if in a dizziness. The waves of the tide cover the body. A boat approaches. Medea recognizes Aegius, who is looking for an oracle and asks her about someone named Jason. Medea asks him in turn if he will be able to receive asylum in his land.

Meanwhile, servants wash a beautiful girl. The girl is named Glauce, and she is the daughter of King Creon. The naked girl looks out of the window. Outside her room, a procession goes through a torch-lit tunnel. Creon, dressed in black and white, talks about the prosperity of the city and their new leader, Jason. Creon has chosen Jason to marry his daughter Glauce.

After the ceremony, held in a cave, Creon and Glauce set sail; but Glauce begs Jason to wait for Medea to be chased away by her father. Medea, a sorceress to whom Jason owes his glory, and who bore him two children, ponders revenge. Creo banishes her and her children from that land, and Medea in vain begs him otherwise in a scene shrouded in mist. Creon fumbles in mud while Medea prepares her magic potion.

Medea moves to the swamp on a boat. Jason goes to see her. She is weaving in the rain. They shake hands through the threads. In vain she reminds him of her children. Faced with her determination, she wishes him a good marriage and seems resigned.

A group of men are parading in front of her house. They come to ask her to interpret the words of an oracle, which they had come to consult from afar. She asks them for a lift in exchange for her arts.

Glauce is playing with the other girls. Jason observes the imposing spectacle of the sea from above.

Jason and Medea are in conversation again, this time on the beach, with the sea becoming a stream of soundless images in the background of their embraced bodies. Only the noises of the two bodies are heard. Jason recovers, and slaps her. Medea falls into the sand. Medea observes her own reflection in the water and asks Jason to at least take care of the children. Jason promises to ask Glauce's permission, but he is sceptical that it will be granted. Medea asks him to allow his children to bring her gift to Glauce: the crown she soaked in poison.

Medea walks on the beach and the spray of the waves looks like a wheat field whose ears sway in the wind.

Glauce dies of the poison, and so Creo tries to help her.

Medea drags the children into the swamp and then hangs them, one at a time (in a suddenly peaceful, colorful and cheerful countryside). Jason is chasing her and instead runs on horseback in a stormy wind. When he arrives, he finds the children hanging from a pole. Medea is already on the boat. Jason spurs the horse but gets lost in the woods. Medea takes off as Jason flounders among the reeds moved by the wind.

Both Von Trier's aesthetic vision and obsession with bureaucracy came to form in Europa/ Zentropa (1991), which is at the same time a surreal satire and an expressionist thriller, a film shot in alternating color, black-and-white and bleeding blends of hues. At times only one object is shown in color on top of a black-and-white background. The desolate landscape of Medea turns into a series of even more desolate environments, each of which seems to represent a terminal condition of living. To compose his fresco of powerful emotions, Von Trier borrows leitmotivs and manners from Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock. The countless visual tricks serve two purposes: to punctuate the narration with an intricate web of symbols, and to keep the audience estranged, detached, conscious that this is just a movie. The narrator, part God and part director, jumps in frequently to address the protagonist himself, and to move the film forward.

The protagonist is a Kafka-esque figure, swallowed in a clockwork that he cannot comprehend. He is a good-natured man who finds himself involved in an espionage intrigue.

The movie opens with black-and-white railroad tracks that flash on the screen, and a narrator counting from 1 to 10, at each number encouraging the audience to relax and concentrate, as if he was trying to hypnotize us. At the count of 10 you are in "Europa", and the movie begins. The voice invites you to get closer to the fence and describes the movements of a man in a very dark urban landscape.
It is 1945. The man, Leopold, a German-American, has just arrived to Germany and finds his uncle, a man in uniform who is as stiff as a nazist soldier, and who, to please his father, has found him a job within the vast Zentropa railway corporation. Leopold has to submit himself to a medical examination in what looks like a nazi laboratory. The uncle warns him that Germans will hate him because Germany has become an American colony.
The narrator describes Leopold's state of mind as he falls asleep. He is addressing him as "you", just like he was addressing the audience as "you" at the beginning of the movie. He is asking the audience to play that character.
In the morning the uncle takes Leopold through the bureaucratic procedures, in a Germany that looks like the German army. An inspector tells him that his first job will be to works as a conductor on a train's sleeping car and calls the job "mythological". Then the gates are opened and a crowd of ordinary people (more like the "miserables") walk in. His uncle is moved to tears.
Leopold walks through the first class car as outside the crowd is jamming the other cars. The train starts moving as thousands of children follow it begging for money. The uncle retites in his cabin and leaves him alone.
Every scene is terribly dark, shot in black and white, with countless references to old German and British movies.
On his first night on the job, he meets a beautiful woman, Katharina, who turns out to be the daughter of the owner of Zentropa. She is puzzled that an American would have any desire to work in Germany. He tells her that he is just trying to help Germany. From the window they observe the corpses of men who have been hanged. Katharina tells him that there are still "partisans" fighting, even if the war is over.
The train goes through a tunnel. The uncle confesses to Leopold that sometimes he doesn't know whether they are moving forward or backward. Leopold comforts him that it must be a simple illusion. The uncle tells him in German that he is an idiot.
The narrator recapitulates what has happened and analyzes the situation like a psychiatrist with a patient. At the count of three...
A message for Leopold: he is invited to dinner with Kate's family. Her brother has an argument with the father. A priest condemns people who are not capable of taking sides. They watch from the window the Americans destroying cranes in the harbor and they comment that the Americans want to prevent Germany from being reborn. Another American, the colonel Alex, joins the party to tell Leopold about the "werewolves", pro-Nazi terrorists who committ acts of sabotage and liquidate Germans who cooperate with the Allies. Alex asks Leopold to keep an eye on them. An atmosphere of suspicion and fear surrounds the rich family.
The narrator recapitulates what "you" have seen.
On another train journey, a stranger who claims to be friend of Kate's family asks Leopold to take care of two children. By superior orders, the heating is disabled. The military police is checking documents when shots are heard: the children shot a man. Leopold involuntarily helped the terrorists commit a crime.
The narrator counts till 10 and Leopold is sent to a party. Leopold falls in love with the woman. They kiss. Max, the father, had to fill a questionnaire about his contacts with the Nazist and now a jew comes to review it. The jew recognizes his as the man who helped him and protected him. Max looks surprised. But Alex reveals to Leopold that Max is too important for the reconstruction and so the jew has been coerced to absolve him. Then Kate takes Leopold in another room to play with a miniature train. The father is shaving in the bathroom and cuts himself on purpose, first the cheek, then the hand... In the meantime Kate admits being a werewolf to Leopold, while she's undressing, and challenges him to show an open mind. While they embrace. The father is bleeding to death in the bath tub, cuts all over his body. Upstairs, Alex and the priest play chess.
On the train again, a passenger asks for his help and takes him through the dejected mankind of the second class to a car where the priest has secretely loaded the Max's coffin. They ask Leopold to please stop the train so they can give the man a proper burial. Leopold pulls the emergency brake and lets them get off at the cemetery. Then joins the ceremony. The Americans arrive and disperse the crowd, which tries invain to hide the coffin. Leopold is summoned in a car and meets again the stranger who asks him to help them again.
The narrator sends him forward one month. The priest asks him to forgive Kate and invites him to mass. The mass is celebrated in a cathedral without roof. The snow is falling inside. Under the snow, Kate begs him to marry him. And they get married.
One day Kate telephones him and asks him to return quickly to the villa. There he finds the stranger, who has just killed Kate's brother and kidnapped her to blackmail Leopold into committing a satobage.
The next train ride is his examination, a very important day for his uncle. Leopold is about to confess the plot to Alex, when he sees from the window another train and Kate at one of the other train's windows. Kates asks him to set the bomb to explode on a bridge. Leopold gets off the train and sets the bomb. Then he boards the train again, but, while he is frantically trying to figure out what is happening outside, the examination continues, with its fastidious reminders of blind bureaucracy, and even turns into a sort of torture.
Alex comes to tell him that Kate is on the train. But she is handcuffed. Alex reveals to Leopold that she wrote anonymous threatening letters to her father, the police have always been after her and he helped them nail her.
Katharina reveals to him that all the people in the train are killers, and that he is the only criminal, referring to his stupidity and naivete'. He is the only one who has not taken sides.
Leopold pulls the emergency brake, grabs a machine gun and terrorizes the passengers. He would like to buy some time to think it over, but the train resumes its ride and finally, over the bridge, the bomb goes off. Leopold is trapped underwater, in a sinking car, and can see, from below, the survivors rescuing the deads.
The narrator counts till ten and he is dead. But the movie continues, as he can see other bodies still alive leaving the train and his own body carried by the current through the weeds all the way to the ocean. Military drums. Visually this is far less experimental than "Medea". It is just one long black-and-white nightmare.

Riget/ Kingdom (1994) was a TV miniseries.

(Translated from my original Italian text by Sebastian Radzikowski)

"Riget/ Kingdom" is a huge Danish hospital. The film is set in the labyrinths of a neurosurgical ward, ranging from the basement to the terrace, as well as the hospital and operating rooms.

An arrogant Swedish professor, Stig Helmer, has just been hired. It is rumored that he was expelled from Sweden for appropriating his students' research. His mistress is one of the doctors. Stig is particularly irritated by the disrespectful behaviour of the young assistant, Hook, who has taken seriously yet another complaint from the simulator Drusse; who is constantly hospitalized in order to to hold her s ances in the company of her faithful hospital. Assisted by the barrelliere son, as she gets on the elevator, she distinctly hears a little girl crying.

The director's son, Mogge, is a jokey schoolboy who has fallen in love with an older nurse. He uses the dream laboratory to make himself beautiful. He them steals a head from a corpse and has it delivered to his beloved; but the head is found by a shy and easily impressionable student.

Stig is introduced to a secret lodge of doctors. He then has to go and console Mona's mother, a little girl who has been left stupid due to her negligence; but Stig is too haughty to apologize. The mother vows to take revenge and files a complaint with the hospital. Stig is a madman who occasionally goes alone on the terrace to scan his homeland with binoculars and rant against the Danish dogs.

The medium wanders around the ward using a pendulum to look for the spirit of the crying child. She convinces her son to help her search the elevator cavity and convinces him that something is wrong. The building is indeed targeted by unexplained events, exploding pipes and cracking floors. Every evening someone calls claiming to be an ambulance that is arriving, and from the way he speaks it seems that he is living at the turn of the century.

Two Mongoloid dishwashers work in the building. class=GramE>The two, boy and girl, seem to know everything that happens in the building, and are also the only ones who know of the existence of the ghost child. Their cryptic phrases also seem to anticipate the future. Their role in the film is basically that of oracles in Greek tragedies.

Stig is asked to operate on a hypnotized (rather than anesthetized) patient. When the patient awakens, he tells Hook that he talked to a little girl who is related to his girlfriend. Hook's girlfriend is pregnant with someone else, a certain Aage who went missing. The little girl reappears in Mona's room to play with her.

The medium convinces her son to take a dog to the hospital, but the dog escapes. He then assists a friend who is dying and convinces her to send her signals from the afterlife. With his help, she understands that the places where the child appears to her are a code: putting together the letters of the various departments, she composes the word M-A-R-Y. He also discovers that in one of the hospital rooms there is an old woman who still believes she is a child in 1919 and plays with a friend named Mary. class=GramE>Has a vintage photo of Mary and her father.

An internationally renowned pathologist cannot conduct his research without liver cancer of a certain type. In the hospital there is a patient who is about to die of that cancer, but the family members do not consent to the removal of the organ. The pathologist is desperate.

Mogge discovers the head has been stolen.

The medium realizes that the dog's behavior and the ambulance calls are all connected to Mary. He finally manages to contact the ghost. The little girl tells her that someone from her family harmed her.

Stig proposes to the psychopath a solution to his problem: transplant the liver to someone else and then extract it from this new patient. Obviously, you must first find a patient who is willing to have an organ with cancer transplanted and then hand it over to the hospital. The plan seems absurd.

Stig , for his part, has the problem of keeping hidden what happened during Mona's operation. His assistant poured some coffee over the anesthesia report, but the coffee did not affect the carbon copy, which is now kept in the underground archives.

During a hearing test, the medium convinces the technician to amplify the room noise as much as possible. They then distinctly hear a little girl ask "why do I have to be killed" class=GramE>?

Hook, the student who stole the head, conducts a colorful black market in his apartment in items and substances illegally stolen from the ward. Not only that: he has a way of blackmailing doctors to get favors in return. To get the head back, Mogge has to bring him the report on Mona, or enter the archives at night. The medium also wants a report, and convinces his son to penetrate the archives at night.

At the time when the alarm does not work, they find themselves in three: Mogge, the son of Drusse and Stig. The student escapes in fear and calls Hook, who arrives in time to lock Stig inside. To free him, the medium (who has obtained the secret code to enter from a dead woman) opens the door. But the medium is interested in Mary, not Stig, so he lets him go without question.

After taking the report, Drusse takes him to the pathologist, the son of a man with whom she had a famous affair. The pathologist tells her that the girl died of turberculosis but is perplexed when he reads that the autopsy found traces of gas in the lungs. The pathologist has meanwhile decided to follow Stig's advice and to transplant the liver. The volunteer is himself.

Drusse and son follow the mysterious ambulance in their car and see a little girl struggling. Drusse sets out in search of the place where she was buried. Evidentially he discovers that Mary's body was never buried: it was kept in an ampoule for didactic purposes. She realizes that Mary is constantly reliving that last night where she tried in vain to escape from the hospital. She was joined by her father, and poisoned with gas. He convinces his son to bury the little girl.

Hook gets his hands on Mona's report. Stig, sensing the worst, is ready to resign. Hook, however, makes him understand that he has no intention of reporting him, but simply of blackmailing him into doing as he is told. Stig comes up with the idea of going to Haiti to get the poison with which they turn people into zombies. Instead of giving his woman a plane ticket, he gives it to a Haitian hospital employee to be his guide and interpreter. He then leaves, abandoning the woman.

Hook gets scared when he sees his transparent girlfriend and immediately calls the medium, class=GramE>who senses something wrong with the fetus that has grown out of all proportion in just three months. Meanwhile, the medium has understood the whole story: the little girl was the illegitimate daughter of an important man who wanted to make her disappear, and he locked her in a hospital room that was now where the elevators are. It is necessary to ensure that the little girl can be reunited with her mother. Thus, an exorcism is needed. Drusse goes to ask the priest of the chapel for a book that explains how to do exorcisms. Hook converts to spiritualism and realizes that the Aage who killed the baby is the same one who got his girlfriend pregnant.

The operation on the pathologist is carried out secretly in an underground room by his colleagues. The transplant succeeds, but then the doctors are unable to extract the liver and have to leave it inside, with the cancer growing by the minute.

Hook (or, better, a personal intervention of the child) convinces the girl to have an abortion and the abortion is held in another underground room.

Still in the basement, the doctor betrayed by Stig trains to shoot mice.

The student, Mogge, finally gets what he was looking for from the nurse and the two make love on the bed of the dream experiments.

Meanwhile, a minister has arrived on an official visit, who decides to start precisely from the labyrinth of the underground. In a quick sequence he discovers the following: Hook, Drusse and his son had performed an exorcism on the child; the doctors operated on the pathologist against her will (because now she wants to keep the cancer), and lastly he discovers the girl who is having an abortion and the student making love to the nurse.

In Haiti, Stig gets the poison.

Back to the minister; it is revealed the exorcism did not work. The baby is still around the hospital. Even though the abortion fails, from the girl's vagina comes the head not of a child, but of a class=GramE>man ...

The second part (another five hours) came out in 1998 and resumes the story from that point. The technique is always the same: hand-held camera, reddish photography.

The underlying theme also remains the same: the arrogance of scientists (mainly played by Stig) is punished with a curse that transforms the hospital, and a symbol of technological perfection (into hell). The class=GramE>dishwasher Mongoloids are again the "Greek chorus" of tragedy; they know all of its nuances and foresee its developments, and above all they give a metaphysical interpretation of it. They hear evil eyes looking at the hospital (represented by the scenes where the hospital is framed from above and through a blurred monitor). They sense that it was not enough to restore peace to the child. There is still evil in the hospital. As usual, the dialogues are comical, and each character is like a parody.

A hospital employee, Falcon, whizzes in an ambulance along the streets of the city, but he does it in the wrong direction, and above all he does it because he is paid: it is a form of Russian roulette, on which the students and employees of the hospital bet their salaries. Among the bettors there is also the director's son, Moosgaard. His friend Christian is instead a good guy who is disgusted by this dangerous and criminal staging.

The old Drusse, just discharged, is hit by a car and is therefore hospitalized between life and death. His son Bulder is immediately warned. Stig is in charge of the operation. Moosgaard s senior, who is afflicted by an existential crisis, has entrusted Stig with the administrative direction of the ward and is looking for a psychologist to treat himself.

Krog takes care of Judith, who has given birth to the little monster with Aage's face. The creature already speaks and grows with shocking speed. Judith doesn't want to see him at first, but Krog convinces her to go to the incubator. They do not find the baby but when they follow the tracks of blood, they are brought back to Judith's room. The baby is there, crying.

The general director of the hospital, always in a suit and tie, is hostile to the doctors' lodge. However, the doctors find a way to protect themselves from his inspections: they convince his assistant that he has a very serious pain in his elbow and give him harmless pills in exchange for his help. The general manager rages above all on Moosgaard, who is quite the opposite; weak and incapable.

Moosgaard junior is a student of Professor Bondo, a Nietzschean character who is afflicted with a sarcoma.

Moosgaard senior begins therapy with Ole, who has an office in the hospital basement and is more of a voodoo sorcerer than a psychiatrist.

Stig administers the poison to Krog.

Mona only hangs her head, but she has learned how to write with cubes. Sadly, nobody notices. Mona's mother has decided to report Stig, and the police are looking for him to ask him questions.

During the operation, Drusse dies for a few moments, but only to take a trip to the afterlife and be convinced by the little girl that the hospital needs her. Drusse comes back to life, but Krog instead dies suddenly.

Meanwhile, Aage went to visit his son, who violently rejected him. Aage is the only one who can save him from the terrible evil that devours him, but the child rejects the Faustian pact.

Falcon has a serious accident. He is saved, but other innocent people are mortally wounded. The only one to worry about the fate of the innocent is Christian, while Moosgaard junior and all the others are only interested in the bet.

A charlatan pretends to operate Drusse with his hand and eats the bloody flesh he has pretended to extract from them. Shortly thereafter he does the same with Bondo's sarcoma, but Bondo soon realizes he has been teased and must accept a real operation.

Drusse feels that the spirits are restless and congregate in Judith's room. He even organizes a meeting in the hospital classroom. During the meeting, a pastor brings her an instrument for the exorcism, but he is seized by a mysterious hemorrhage and dies instantly. The spirits run away.

Christian, the model student the girls find boring, finds Falcon and blackmails him: he wants to take his place.

Krog's funeral takes place in the basement. Stig looks for him because he wants to administer the antidote, after which ' Krog will only be a zombie. The comic chase of the coffin ends in the crematorium, where Stig desperately tries to hold back the coffin. Instead, Krog is saved by a nurse who hears him beating inside the coffin. Krog is alive, but he has become an evil and cruel being, determined to eliminate weak patients from the hospital.

Rigmor shoots Stig, but Stig is only wounded. Nonetheless, he is forced into a wheelchair, which makes him even grumpier.

Drusse senses the presence of the devil. It is Aage, rejected by Judith's baby, who prefers to die rather than betray humanity. Drusse wonders who has invoked the devil and begins the search.

Christian looks after the innocent and promises to help his family when he dies. He needs money, and the racing ambulance driver job (which everyone bets on) gives him the opportunity to get a lot quickly.

Stig is one of the professors who will have to judge the final exam of Moosgaard junior, and Moosgaard junior tries to ingratiate himself with him. Stig asks him to find out where Krog hid the report on Mona. The student manages to get Krog to talk. Stig goes to the archive and recovers the compromising relationship, but then remains locked in the archive with Krog. Krog wants to kill him, and Stig wants to run away with the report; but both of them can't move because Moosgaard has reactivated the alarm. Stig still manages to escape, but only to realize that the relationship is a note from Rigmor: Rigmor has already taken the relationship and now forces him to marry her. Stig is as arrogant (and racist towards the Danes) as he is slimy. The law seeks him to fix the first hearing of the trial, but he continues to wheel away in a wheelchair through the corridors of the hospital.

Christian agrees to go for a run blindfolded.

Drusse and his son fly over the hospital in search of the origin of the disease and discover a thermal bath in which the plane hovers, even without an engine. The plane crashes, but the spirits save it.

The baby begs Krog to help him die, but Judith refuses.

Moosgaard senior is still in therapy, forced into increasingly humiliating penances by the Nazi Ole.

Drusse discovers an occult ceremonial and follows a hooded man who returns to the neurosurgery ward. It is he who invokes the devil. It's about finding out who he is.

Krog realizes that Mona is trying to reveal something about Stig. Stig hears this and decides to kidnap Mona.

To operate on Bondo, one would need to find a donor, and the ideal would be a relative. Drusse reveals to his son that he is Bondo's half-brother. Bondo is at first disgusted to learn that his genetic code is the same as the fat and stupid nurse, but then he is moved by the latter's affection.

Moosgaard junior manages to track down an old assistant of Stig and uncover an act of plagiarism with which to blackmail him, so Stig gives him the highest grade.

The Mongoloid proposes marriage to the Mongoloid.

Drusse discovers that the devil is the nurse Camilla, the sex-hungry one that Moosgaard junior cannot satisfy. Camilla runs away chased by Drusse.

Krog accidentally finds himself with the opportunity to turn off the power to all patients and thereby cause the death of all the weak and of course he does. In cutting off the power, however, he also interrupts the connection to which Christian's blind run was leading. Christian crashes into the car of Moosgaard junior, who is kissing the cute student. They all die.

Stig has lost Mona.

Breaking The Waves (1996) is a naturalistic drama that bridges the gap between Von Trier's surrealism and Scandinavia's literary and cinematic traditions.

The film is set in a secluded religious community in Scotland during the 1970 s. A Norwegian worker working on an offshore oil rig marries a girl from the village, despite the hostility of the family. The girl, Bess, is not entirely sane and has already been admitted once to a psychiatric hospital. The two get married in a church without bells.

The honeymoon for Bess is a series of wonderful discoveries, starting with sex. When Jan (the worker) has to get back to the platform, Bess goes into hysterics. Bess spends her days waiting for Jan's phone calls and talking to God in church.

Bess begs God to send Jan home, and one day god seems to please her, but not in the desired way: Jan is the victim of a serious accident that leaves him completely paralyzed. Transported to the village hospital, he is cared for by Bess's sister, who is a nurse, and by the doctor who has followed Bess's troubles. Bess feels guilty about what happened, especially as everyone around her seems to be berating her for not doing the right things. The religious community is oppressive with its infinite rules of behavior. Therefore, when Jan (more or less sane), asks her to find another man and return to give him the details of their interventions, Bess decides to accept. At first she is reluctant, class=GramE>then she offers herself to the doctor, who at least she knows well. She then masturbates a man on the bus. Her husband's condition deteriorates, and Bess becomes convinced that this is due to her reluctance to fulfill his wishes. In vain, the sister tries to convince her that Jan doesn't know what she is saying: Bess dresses and puts on make-up like a prostitute and begins to get men. Her husband's convalescence and Bess's sexual adventures go hand in hand, and indeed Jan's condition seems to improve. Bess loves him madly and fearlessly challenges the community and ultimately God himself, who has stopped talking to her. Soon word spreads, and the mother herself threatens her with excommunication.

The doctor explains to Jan that Bess is self-destructing and convinces him to sign permission to intern her again, at least until Jan is cured. Meanwhile, she has gone on a ship to offer herself to the captain, but he just wants to watch her do it with a sailor. She refuses and is beaten. When she returns to the village, she is expelled from the church and banned from the community under the eyes of her mother. Two men pick her up to take her to the psychiatric hospital, but she manages to escape and return to the country. The children throw class=GramE>stones at her, the mother refuses to open up to her, and the priest leaves her exhausted on the ground. Only the sister dares to break the harsh law of the elders. Jan is still sick, however, and Bess convinces herself that he's gotten worse because she refused to make love to the sailor. She therefore returns to the ship to complete the mission. Sadly, she is instead beaten almost to death, and when she returns to the hospital it is not to visit Jan, but to die.

Jan recovers quickly. The village elders decree that Bess can be buried but without a funeral. During the burial the priest yells that Bess is going to hell and only her sister dares to object, but little do they know they actually buried a coffin full of class=GramE>sand. Jan had her body stolen to be buried at sea. Jan has now completely regained control of himself. The next day the sailors observe a strange phenomenon: the sounds of bells coming from the class=GramE>sky ...

The film is divided into multiple parts, separated by bucolic scenes that look like photographs (very chromatic) of still lives.

There are many similarities between Breaking The Waves and Dancer In The Dark (2000). Dancer is set in a working class milieu, but also in an isolated community. Dancer's protagonist is a perfectly lucid woman, who knows exactly what she lives for, but so does Waves' mad protagonist. Both have a visceral power at their core, a visceral power that manifests itself through a woman's determination to sacrifice for what she loves. Waves' theme of injustice also is mirrored here, this time realistically grafted on the barbaric American tradition of putting criminals to death, except that here it becomes a sociopolitical theme rather than a fairy tale (the death penalty mainly kills innocents who can't pay for a good attorney).

Selma (Bjork), a Czech immigrant who wears thick glasses, and Katie (Deneuve) are two friends from a small village who work at the same factory. Selma had to cheat to pass the medical test, because she actually can't see too well, even if she has to operate a very delicate machine. They also take music and dance classes together and are rehearsing for a show. Selma has only two interests in life: her child Gene and music. Selma and Gene live in a trailer on the property of the police chief, Bill, and his wife Linda. Bill is Bjork's landlord and friend. Bill brings her Gene when he finds him strolling around instead of attending school. Bill and Linda even buy a bicycle for Gene's birthday. Selma has a discrete admirer, Jeff, a nice man who waits for her every night at the exit and offers her a ride. Selma always politely refuses and rides her bicycle. She told him repeatedly that there is nothing wrong with him, it is just that she doesn't want a boyfriend right now. When she gets home, she religiously counts her money, that she keeps in a box.
But one day Bill confesses to Selma that he is broke. Linda has been spending all his money and the bank does not want to give him more credit. Selma in turn reveals that she is going blind. It is a heriditary disease and she knows Gene will also go blind if she doesn't find the money for an expensive operation. That's what she has been working for all her life. Bill asks her to lend him money, but she refuses. That money is too important to her.
At work, Katie finds out that Selma is losing her sight and keeps an eye on her. Selma even accepts to work a night shift, that implies working faster and taking care of two machines. She can't keep up with the pace, but Katie shows up to help her. No matter how busy she is, Selma does not give up music and keeps taking the classes. After work, she walks back home following the railway tracks. Her eyes are getting worse and worse.
At home, Bill is waiting for her. He is getting desperate and thinking suicide. He realizes that she can't see him and pretends to leave the room, but actually stays there to spy her while she takes her money out.
The following day she has to give up the music classes because she can't dance anymore. Then she is fired at the factory because the boss can't trust her with the machine anymore. She is still smiling and heads home with her last salary. On the way home, along the railway tracks, Jeff reaches her and realizes that she's blind. She asks a favor of a ride to an important appointment later that day. Then she heads home. The money is gone, the box is empty. She knows who took it and walks to Bill's home. Linda welcomes her with a hysterical scene: Bill told her that she, Selma, has been trying to seduce him. Selma walks upstairs and confronts Bill. Bill refuses to return her money and even pretends with Linda that Selma is trying to steal it. Linda runs to get help while Selma fights to keep the box. In the fight, a shot wounds Bill. Bill grabs the box and refuses to let it go unless Selma kills him. He begs her to kill him. Selma is desperate and eventually shoots him, but keeps missing him. So she grabs a drawer from the desk and crushes his head with it. Then she takes the box and walks to the road, where Jeff is waiting. Jeff notices the blood and Selma stops by a lake to wash her hands. Then she goes to see a surgeon and gives him all the money to pay for the operation. She gives her last name as Novi, that was the last name of a famous Czech actor when she was a child.
Jeff drives her back and she asks to go to the rehearsal. By now, she doesn't see anything. But she is happy to hear the music. Everybody knows what she has done and they call the police while they keep her there with excuses.
At the trial she tries to tell the truth but nobody believes her. The jury decides that she killed Bill in order to steal the money. She is sentenced to death by hanging.
While in jail, she makes friend with a female guardian but she refuses to see her son. Jeff finds out what she did with the money and Katie finds an attorney who would reopen the case and certainly save her life based on the fact that she needed the money for her child. But this would cost her exactly the money that she spent all her life saving. Selma is furious at Katie. Katie thinks that Gene needs a mother, but Selma thinks that he needs his eyes and there is no point in spending the money to keep her alive, blind and jailed for the rest of her life. Therefore, she refuses to sign and goes to death and still refuses to talk to her child.
The last scene is an agonizing reportage of the hanging. While held by insensitive guards, she screams that they remove the bag from her face, and the female guard does it against the procedure, because Selma can't see anyway. Unfortunately, the action is abruptly interrupted by (tedious) songs. This is the weakest element in a film that, otherwise, stands as a powerful naturalistic drama, worthy of Strindberg and Ibsen.

Dogville (2003) is both a philosophical parable (a very bitter and cynical one) about the damnation of the human soul, and an experiment in avantgarde theater, disguised as a fairy tale (with the addition of the hand-held camera). The combination is reminiscent of Brecht's plays. It is, by far, Von Trier's darkest vision of humankind.

A narrating voice describes the events (as if it were a fairy tale), and the whole action is set on a flat stage, where buildings, streets and trees are simply marked on the stage by words and a few representative pieces of furniture (as if it were a theatrical play). We don't see the town itself, we only see a map of it.
During the Depression, Dogville is a small American town (15 adults in all) located in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by mountains. The road ends in Dogville. The people of Dogville are very poor. They live simple lives. They have to work very hard to get by. Tom Edison is a young man who can afford not to work because his father, once a doctor, receives a reasonable pension. Tom is considered very intelligent: in fact, he always beats his friend Bill at checkers, and enjoys humiliating him every day. He is also in love with Bill's sister Liz, who pretends to have no interest in him. One night, Tom hears gunshots. Shortly afterwards a scared woman shows up, Grace. She is obviously running away, barefoot, her clothes ripped apart. He helps her hide in the old mine. A car shows up in town. The passenger, who sounds like a mobster, gives Tom a business card and asks him to phone if he sees a young woman. The gangsters leave, and Tom holds a moral lecture for his fellow citizens. They are bored and resentful of his words. Eventually, he introduces the fugitive and asks them to shelter her from the gangsters who are chasing her. The citizens decide to grant her two weeks. Tom gives Grace a tour of the town and its sins, but Grace only sees a nice community in a ideal natural setting. She falls in love with the community and decides to make them love her. She only sees beauty in them. Grace offers them help, but they all claim they don't need any help. She has to convince them that there are things she can do for them, to improve their lives. They are reluctant, but eventually she manages to work a little bit for each person: she takes care of the children of a bigot and her hostile husband Chuck; the spends time conversing with the old man who refuses to admit he is blind; etc. She even falls in love with the little figurines that the only store has on display and will never sell.
The only person who doesn't like her is Chuck, who basically warns her that she got it all wrong: it is not her who is fooling the town, it is the town that is fooling her. But she thinks that Chuck is simply suffering a lot and offers comfort. The blind man eventually admits he is blind, something he had never done before. When the two weeks have elapsed, the town has another meeting and they all decide to keep her longer. She is moved by their generosity. In fact, each of them had left her a little present in case the others voted to expel her. Now she gets her own house, and they even pay her a bit. She is able to save money and buy all the figurines.
She works very hard and everybody likes her even more. Tom falls in love with her, and she reciprocates. One day, while the town is having a party, a police officer posts a warrant: she is wanted as a bank robber. It is obvious that she cannot have robbed those banks, since she has been with them all the time. But the town takes advantage of her new status (as a fugitive wanted by the police, not only by the gangsters): they tell her that she has to work twice more, and they will cut her salary by half. She accepts, still willing to do anything to stay there. Nobody needed anything, but now they depend on her. And they are taking advantage of her kindness. A child blackmails her into spaking him, something that her mother has specifically forbidden Grace from doing. When the police comes back looking for her, Chuck rapes her: she can scream for help, and be caught by the police, or let him rape her. The child tells his mom that Grace spanked him, and she complains with Grace. Other citizens complain that her work is sloppy, or that she is late: she has to work very hard to please everybody. She doesn't complain, she apologizes. Liz is jealous that Grace and Tom love each other. Chuck keeps raping her. One day someone sees them. Instead of defending her, the women of the town decide to punish her. The bigot breaks two of her figurines, which mean everything to Grace, and tells her that she will break the others if she doesn't cry. Grace can't help crying and the bigot destroys all of her precious figurines.
Grace decides to leave the town. Tom gives her some money that he says he borrowed from his father. Grace buys a ride with the only driver who ever leaves town. But first the driver wants sex on top of his pay, and then, after a long trip, she wakes up to simply find herself back in Dogville: the citizens had guessed that she wanted to leave, and had already decided to prevent her from leaving. On top of that, Tom stole (not borrowed) the money, and let them think that she stole it. Grace is chained like a dog to a heavy wheel, so she can't run away. All the males in town start raping her. And she still has to carry out the same hard chores. Tom doesn't protect her, despite the fact that he loves her. Indeed, he is the only one who does not rape her. At a town meeting, she tells the truth, all the sins that they are committing against her. But this simply causes more hatred. The citizens tell Tom to get rid of her. Tom picks up the business card and calls the gangster.
The citizens now treat her kindly. She sees that they are clearly waiting for something. One night the cars arrive. The whole town is assembled, proud of delivering the fugitive to the gangsters. Tom acts as their leader, hoping in a big reward. The gangsters free the girl and push her into the car of the boss. He is her father and wants her to come back to him, and share his power. She has refused and was almost killed by him in anger. At first, she tells him that she prefers Dogville than the mob. But then she is enlightened (literally, by a full moon) and decides that the town deserves punishment for its sins. Suddenly, the gentle and meek is filled with wrath and revenge. Her father orders the whole town to be shot and burned. Grace asks that the children be killed the same way their mother destroyed her figurine: first two of them and then, if she cries, the rest of them. The gangsters kill everybody except Tom. She kills Tom herself. Only a dog survives. This parable contains, in turn, a parable inside itself, the parable of a Christian-style sacrifice and martyrdom by an innocent in the name of universal salvation. That the innocent turns out to be a woman, and then the daughter of a mafia boss, simply increases the layers of possible interpretations. That she eventually chooses to use her father as the angel of justice to punish the humans who have turned the eden into a living hell, that she carries out the universal judgement with no mercy for the sinners, adds another level of interpretation, that mixes Biblical imagery and sociopolitical analysis. That then she chooses to become an even worse sinner than the citizens of Dogville adds yet another layer, another mixture of metaphysics and cynicism.
Tom is, in many ways, the ultimate loser. He is considered smart, and considers himself smart because he wins at checkers, but, by the end of the film, he has achieved nothing: he has not written his novel, he is the only male who has not slept with Grace, he has made all the wrong decisions, and he has proved to be the most hypocritical and coward of them all. If Dogville is the equivalent of Dante's hell, Tom the writer is sent to the lowest layer. And Tom is the only character who has a well-defined Brechtian social identity: he is "the writer". Von Trier seems to indulge in exposing "the writer" as a particularly repugnant sort of people.
Von Trier's psychological tricks work wonders. For example, at the beginning one is tempted to feel that the gorgeous stranger is trying to fool the town, so that they don't deliver her to the gangsters. But we soon realize that it is instead the town that is fooling her. We learn to love them just so that we can truly hate them.

Manderlay (2005), the second part of the "USA Land of Opportunities" trilogy, employed a staging similar to the one of Dogville.

Direkt ren for det Hele/ The Boss of It All (2006)

Antichrist (2009) is a minor Satanic horror movie (about a woman who is brainwashed by the Satanic books she read), too slow at the beginning and too fast later on to be truly suspenseful, but with a great ending.

The film opens with a slow-motion rendition of a couple having sex in the bathroom (including a close-up of the penis entering the vagina). Meanwhile a smiling toddler escapes from his crib, pushes a chair against the wall, climbs on the chair and falls off the window holding his teddy bear just as his parents are having an orgasm. The screen goes black and the slow-motion scene ends. The film then shifts to the funeral. Father and mother follow the coffin (as viewed from inside the hearse). The mother collapses behind the hearse. The mother is so devastated that she has to be hospitalized in a mental hospital. The father is a psychologist himself and doesn't trust the hospital's psychologist, who is giving her too many pills, and convinces her to return home. She becomes his patient. She has a vivid memory of their cabin in the woods, where she spent some time to finish her thesis, alone with the toddler, but then she didn't finish it. She has lots of anxiety, and one night almost kills herself with pills, and the father decides that she has to face the thing that causes the anxiety. She says that the woods are what she's most afraid of. As he elicits her nightmare of the woods, we see extremely slow-motion images of her alone in the woods, heading to their cabin. They take the train and then hike for several hours to the cabin which is located far from any town. While she takes a nap, the father walks around and runs into a disgusting scene: a doe has a bloody stillborn fawn hanging from its vagina. When they reach the cabin, the mother is truly scared of the place. He has to carry her on his back because she can't even walk. She has another crisis when she sees (or imagines) a chick fall from the branch of a tree to its death and being attacked by ants. She reveals to him what happened when she was at a cabin alone with their toddler: she was writing when she was startled by the sound of their child crying; she looked for the boy in the woods but couldn't find him despite hearing the crying; and then she found him smiling inside the house, while the crying continued out in the woods. We see that she was writing a thesis on gynocide, the killing of women. That day she realized that all things in nature must die, and says that "nature is Satan's church". Suddenly one day she wakes up cured. On the other hand, he admits that he has been having crazy dreams. She retorts that psychology is no longer interested in dreams ("Freud is dead"). The father feels a presence in the woods and finds a talking dead fox that says: "chaos reigns". While she is asleep, he explores the attic and finds a collection of ancient prints depicting scenes in which women are being tortured and/or burned. He reads her unfinished thesis: as he turnes the pages, her writing becomes less and less human. She tells him that, as she studied the evil things done by men to women, she came to believe in the evil nature of women Later they are having sex and she begs him to hurt her. He refuses. But then they have sex on the roots of a giant dead tree and this time he does slap her. We see bodies sticking out of the tree's roots. She finds a copy of the autopsy that he had hidden from her. The autopsy found a slight deformity in the child's feet. By looking at an old picture, the father realizes that the mother was putting the child's shoes on the wrong feet, causing the deformity. Just then she attacks him with beastly fury accusing him of wanting to leave her. After trying to have sex with him, she hits his genital so hard with a piece of wood that he is left unconscious. He tries to masturbate him but only gets blood out of his penis. As he is still lying unconscious, she grabs a tool and drills a hole through his leg and then inserts into the hole the axis of a heavy grindstone. When he wakes up, he crawls away in pain and hides in a foxhole that leads him to some sort of cave. She keeps looking for him until she finds him. She starts hitting his little cave with a shovel burying him alive. At night she returns to remove the dirt. He is still alive. She takes him back to the cabin and whispers something about "three beggars" who have to come and will require him to die. We see in a flashback that she saw the toddler climbing to the window and didn't do anything to help him because she was enjoying the sex. Lying next to the father on the floor of the cabin, she grabs a pair of scissors and cuts off her clitoris. This time she's the one who loses consciousness. The father lies on the floor in pain and stares at the sky through the window. He sees three constellations and a diagram titled "The Three Beggars": despair, grief and pain. He finds a way to release his leg from the grindstore but the noise wakes her up and he attacks her with the scissors. It is hailing outside: witches were known to summon hailstorms. He strangles her. In the middle of the night he burns the body on a funeral pyre. We see a multitude of naked dead bodies. The following day the hailstorm has ended. The father limps into the woods where he eats berries while a deer, a fox and a crow stare at him. A crowd of women (presumably witches who have been burned in the past) emerges from the woods and they spread all over the hill where he is standing.

The bleak Melancholia (2011) is a film divided in two parts, each corresponding to one sister. The first one is presented as a trouble rich young woman with no respect for anyone but perhaps desperately needing affection. The second one is presented as an obsessive organizer, a fanatic of rituals, all the way to the end. When the two are faced with an imminent catastrophe of cosmic proportion, it is the first one who can face it heroically. The first half is a sort of "documentary" of the young woman's opulent wedding reception, orchestrated by her sister in the royal family mansion, amid a golf course and a lake. Its main purpose, somewhere between Bunuel and Bergman, seems to show how pointless and futile the rituals of human life can be. The second half is a long, agonizing wait for the end of the world (surprisingly devoid of tv news and real-time Internet tweets). Unfortunately, as usual, Von Trier opts for a shaky hand-held camera that ruins many of the most powerful scenes. It is telling that the film has two of the most powerful scenes in cinema's history, the very beginning and the very end; and both are filmed with a steady camera.

The film opens with a dreamy wordless slow-motion stream of images (set to music from Richard Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde") that capture the minute details of life on Earth. Then the scene moves to the universe and we see two planets colliding. This overture turns out to be a metaphorical summary of the film, from the wedding dress of the first woman to the desperate anxious run of the second woman holding a baby, all the way to the apocalyptic ending of the world.

The first part is centered on Justine, a young woman who just got married. She and her husband are having fun in the limo that is bringing them to the fabulous mansion of her sister Claire, where Claire has assembled the guests and prepared a lavish dinner party. Justine and her husband Michael are indifferent to the fact that they are two hours late. The dinner is a concentrate of bad mood: the girls' mother is a bitter resentful woman who despises rituals and hates her good-for-nothing husband, Claire's husband John, a scientist who has spent a fortune for the party, is exasperated by the family's bad behavior (to the point that he throws out his mother-in-law's suitcases), and Justine's boss is only interested in business and promotes her to art director. Justine is fascinated by a bright star, that John recognizes as Antares. Justine tries repeatedly to leave the party (rides away on a golf cart, takes a bath, puts Claire's son to bed), and Claire has to chase her and bring her back to reality. Michael tries in vain to woo her. He shows her the photograph of a plot of land that he has bought for them: his dream. She drops the photograph, clearly not interested. Justine's boss introduces her to a new employee, the shy and embarrassed Tim. Justine tries in vain to talk to her parents: her mom scornfully kicks her out of her bedroom, and her father promises to stay the night but then leaves without even telling her. Michael tries to make love to Justine, but she gets suddenly cold. She walks outside in the immense lawn and makes love with Tim who happens to walk there. Michael leaves her, and the boss fires Tim. Tim, noticing that she has just lost a husband and a job, proposes to her as both a new sexual partner and a business partner, but she ignores him.
The following day the two sisters go horseriding: Justine can't find her favorite star in the sky anymore.

The second part is centered around Claire. Justine is suffering from a major nervous breakdown and can barely take a taxi to Claire's mansion. Justine is reduced to a larva, incapable of eating and bathing. We are now told that a planet, Melancholia, that was hidden behind the Sun, is on a collision route with the Earth. It has eclipsed Justine's favorite star. John is excited, and convinced that the planet will not cause any damage to the Earth. Claire gets more and more apprehensive as the giant planet appears on the horizon. Justine is indifferent and cynical. Justine beats her horse senselessly during a horseride, a sign that her mental disorder is not improving, and one night she walks out to lie naked bathing in the light of the approaching planet. The loyal waiter of the family disappears, and Justine sarcastically implies that he has decided to spend the end of the world with his family. Claire wants to believe her husband that there is nothing to fear. Justine, however, points out that she knows how many beads were in the jar of the wedding's guessing game: 678. She knows "things" and she knows that the Earth is the only planet with life in the universe, and will be destroyed in the collision.
Finally the planet rises majestically and quickly swells. Claire is hysterical but John has calculated that the planet will recede; and in fact it does. Everything seems to get back to normal. The following day, however, John is transfixed and then disappears. Claire realizes that the planet is getting closer again, faster and faster. She finds her husband in the stables: he has committed suicide. She calmly cooks breakfast for Justine and her son, but then her nerves crack and she tries to escape. It's a pointless attempt because there is no place to hide. She comes back. Justine invites the child to build a magic cave out of sticks collected in the wood to protect themselves from the explosion. They do so and then wait under the sticks while the planet gets bigger and bigger, closer and closer. Melancholia crashes into the Earth and the screen explodes.

Nymphomaniac - Volume 1 & 2 (2013) and The House That Jack Built (2018) are minor movies.

The third TV miniseries, titled Riget Exodus/ The Kingdom Exodus (2022), consists of five episodes.

What is unique about this music database