Life on Lars

Tired of Cannes, Lars von Trier made the world’s media trek to Denmark to see his latest film.

Sep 28 2006

Lars von Trier turned 50 earlier this year. He celebrated, as is common among men of his age, by making a few resolutions. It was time, the Danish director of ‘The Idiots’ and ‘Dogville’ decided, to tackle some of his more lingering demons and to make a clean break.

‘I needed to do something that was light,’ explains von Trier, who has spoken before of his struggle with depression. ‘I’ve had a lot of anxiety and some terrible years, and I thought it was really important that I enjoy my next film. This sounds terrible, but I think that I’ve been working too hard for the film media, and now is a time when maybe I don’t have to work so hard and maybe enjoy myself a little more.’

He split from his producer, Vibeke Windeløv, who had produced all of his films since ‘Breaking the Waves’ – the film which in 1996 won him a reputation as a provocateur who liked to make his female characters and actors suffer (‘If you like that film,’ one academic told her film critic husband after a screening, ‘I’m leaving you’). He postponed the completion of his ‘American trilogy’, which began with ‘Dogville’ and continued with last year’s ‘Manderlay’, and announced that he was scaling back. His next film would be ‘The Boss of it All’, a Dogme comedy in Danish. He was eager to move away from dissecting grand, American themes and wanted to make us laugh for the first time since ‘The Idiots’. Lars was coming home.

That wasn’t all. He declared that he wouldn’t premiere his new film at Cannes, as he had for two decades. He was sick of endless interviews and combative press conferences at which he was forced to explain charges of anti-Americanism. The director – who famously doesn’t take aeroplanes – would not be driving south in his family’s camper-van. He wanted to present his new film, with little fanfare and minimal fuss, at the Copenhagen Film Festival, a few miles down the road from the headquarters of his company, Zentropa, which occupies a former military barracks at the edge of the city.

Such was the plan. What actually happened when ‘The Boss of it All’ had its premiere in Copenhagen last Thursday was that instead of Lars coming to Cannes, a mini version of Cannes came to him. About 20 journalists from all over Europe squeezed into Zentropa’s makeshift screening-room – some on chairs, some on cushions on the floor – to watch ‘The Boss of it All’. As expected, the promise of a ‘comedy’ from von Trier shouldn’t be taken entirely at face value. That said, the film turns out to be his most accessible and certainly his funniest film since ‘The Idiots’, with which it certainly shares some qualities of atmosphere and look.

The film opens with von Trier talking to camera via his reflection in a window. This movie is ‘not worth a moment’s reflection’, he explains, and is meant only to provoke ‘a jolly old time’. It unfolds almost entirely within the soulless offices of an undetermined company. Its boss, Ravn (Peter Gantzler) is in a pickle. He wants to sell his company to a gruff Icelander, Finnur (Fridrik Thor Fridriksson), but for the past few years he has been manipulating his employees with recourse to a fictional ‘boss of it all’, a non-existent über-boss who lives in America. In order to secure the sale of his company, Ravn hires a dopey actor, Kristoffer (Jens Albinus) to play the part of the boss. It’s funny – but also a more thoughtful work than von Trier admits. It works both as light Shakespearean comedy – it thrives on disguise and misidentity – and as an allegory for the relationship between directors and actors.

‘All the jokes are things that I find funny,’ says von Trier, ‘and some of it, from what I could hear at the screening, nobody else finds funny at all.’

Von Trier is keen not to burn bridges with Cannes, the festival which has offered him a platform for so many years. ‘Cannes has been very good to me, but I’m not crazy about the whole thing. It’s hard work. Of course it stands for good films, but it also stands for a lot of superficial nonsense which I can live without. I hate waiters, I would rather go and fetch my meal myself. I’m better without it. I also had a word with Gilles Jacob [the president of Cannes] and I promised to make a little film for their opening next year. So we are good friends.’

His last film, ‘Manderlay’ received mixed reviews and failed to make any mark at the box office at home or abroad. Despite tackling themes of race and slavery, it didn’t cause much of a fuss either. It’s easy to imagine that von Trier doesn’t respond well to silence. His paradox is that he craves attention yet he also suffers from it. He claims, though, that the experience of making ‘Manderlay’ was dull and that’s why he ached for a change of direction. For ‘The Boss of it All’, he has employed a new camera process – Automavision – which makes the cinematographer redundant. The camera itself makes decisions such as which aperture to choose. The result is that ‘The Boss of it All’ consists entirely of fixed shots and light-levels vary, sometimes wildly, from one shot to the next. It’s an aesthetic which roots the film firmly in the realm of the experimental.

‘The problem with “Manderlay” was that I was doing the same thing as I was with “Dogville”. Which was not so interesting. Whenever I have to test something, I feel the best. To make a clean or a pure comedy, and a pure horror film, is something I always wanted to do. So I thought that 50 was maybe the time when I could.’

The horror film is next – which, he says with a smile, will be called ‘Antichrist’. And he’s put ‘Washington’, the planned third installment of his American trilogy on permanent hold. As for ‘The Boss of it All’, it received poor reviews in the local Danish press after its first screening, despite being received well by international critics. How does von Trier feel about the reaction on his home turf?

‘I think they don’t like what von Trier is doing,’ he says quietly in a corner of the room at Zentropa. ‘It doesn’t matter what I did. They still wouldn’t like it.’

‘The Boss of it All’ screens at the London Film Festival next month.

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