Movie such as this is one of the reasons I can't stand any of the depressing melodrama for the sake of depressing melodrama that's over-saturating every medium on the planet these days. Enough of these bad things happen in real life, we don't need everything we watch nor read or listen to; to get away from normal life to be completely centered around the exact thing we're trying to take our minds off of. Director by King Dogma Attitude Lars Von Trier, 'the Idiots' is his try to make a film in compliance with the Dogme '95 Manifesto film making movement which he started. He fails to live up to it. What is the Dogme'95 Manifesto? Dogme '95 also known as Dogme#2 were rules to create filmmaking based on the traditional values of story, acting, theme, and excluding the use of elaborate special effects or technology following close to a Vow of Chastity rule. Like a whore in a nun's church, Lars broke the rules in this movie by bringing a prop onto the set and used special lighting. Von Trier also used background music (Le Cygne by Camille Saint-Saëns) in the film. The whole Dogme '95 movement collapse with this movie. Due to trying to live up to the Vows, the movie suffers from errors on screen such as boom mics or cameraman getting into the shots. The idiots also marks the second film in von Trier's Golden Heart Trilogy, which includes Breaking the Waves (1996) and Dancer in the Dark (2000) which had a woman put into wickedness actions. The woman in this one is Karen (Bodil Jørgensen) who is taken some interest in an anti-bourgeois group, leaded by Stoffer (Jens Albinus), whom spend their time acting like mentally disabled people in public to challenge the establishment through provocation. The idiots start to see that with they can get away with a lot with playing dumb, and see a romantic ideal of being disability gives until reality hit them hard. The movie is spoken in Danish, but I can't understand the message they are trying to say with this film. I can't decide if that dogma filmmaking method is admirable or intentionally hamstringing itself arbitrarily. The characters are unlikeable. The mocking of Down syndrome is rude. Then there is the pointless gangbang scene. That part of the film was pure hardcore porn. I know Lars Von Trier lived in nudist commune environment and yes, I know Danish has more lax attitude towards nudity and sex than the US apparently has by comparison, but honestly what was the point of that scene? It felt out of place. I felt that the Gruppeknald scene was just there to feed Lars Von Tier's pervert ego. Trine Michelsen is only in the movie for this scene since she is a porn star. Not a big porn star, but more importantly she is the daughter of the most influential Danish movie critic at the time Ole Michelsen. Ole Michelsen is famous for saying he reviews all types of movies except the type his daughter stars in. Lars von Trier makes a cameo in his movie in exactly just for this scene, by having Ole Michelsen was forced to review a movie that has the director sleeping with his daughter. That's pretty crude. For me, the idea that if someone is broken. I should be able to sympathize with their horrible behavior that demeans a group human beings that are already in an oppressed position to begin with is just no. That ending did nothing for me. I didn't feel sorry for any of them at all. This is not an art for art sakes, or whatever they made up to sound sophisticated movie, it's Z Grade exploitation either desperately trying or pretending to have a meaning. Mange tak, Lars. You made a pretty horrible movie.
Review of The Idiots
