Lars von Trier

Dogville

Watched: 2005

That's a short movie - for Lars von Trier. A bit less than 3 hours. I've decided to watch a few more of his movies.

The set for "Dogville" is some sort of large stage with some stage utensils (furniture, parts of walls, a few rocks), but basically with lines painted on it which show the boundaries of houses and other objects of a small American town named "Dogville". Objects are labelled: a rectangle may be labelled "Tom's house", the space between the rectangles is labelled "Elm street", and two rosettas are labelled "Gooseberry bushes". Cars enter and leave the stage sometimes, but otherwise, the whole movie is played on that stage, with the exception of one scene on the back of a lorry while it is supposedly not in Dogville.

The story is told in nine "chapters", with a narrator commenting in the background and telling what is happening, while the actors in the foreground play out the scenes. The movie is set in the great depression, and at the beginning, Grace, a beautiful young woman (Nicole Kidman) is pursued by gangsters and hides in Dogville. After some persuasion, the citizens at first accept her, in exchange for domestic help they get from her, and as the story evolves, she is more and more integrated into the society. But pressure mounts from the outside: there are increasingly pressing search warrants for Grace out, and the Sheriff keeps asking questions. As the pressure mounts, the village people try to get more and more from Grace in exchange for hiding her, and she is increasingly exploited.

The set with walls replaced by lines drawn on the stage gives the director some interesting options to show in the background what is going on, which the people in the foreground supposedly don't know (because in their world, the walls are real. People open non-existing doors on the stage, and the door hinges even squeak.) When Grace is raped for the first time, the camera after some time moves on to a dialogue between some people in "Elm Street", while in the background the rape still continues.

In the end, it gets a bit philosophical (it wouldn't be a Lars von Trier movie otherwise), and the finale is surprising.

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