Wednesday, August 23, 2017
235 - Europa, 1991, Denmark. Dir. Lars von Trier.
Leopold Kessler gets a job on the Zentropa Railroad.
His uncle Uncle Kessler helps him.
Or claims he does.
We cannot tell whether Leopold is being helped or knocked around.
Leopold is innocent. And he has come to Germany in the period after the War because someone needs to show Germany some kindness.
Leopold shows everyone kindness.
He is eager to please.
But he gets knocked around by a bureaucratic insistence on meaningless rules governing myriad minutiae.
He is reprimanded for not putting a chalk mark on the bottom of shoes to "guarantee" that they have been polished.
He insists that one can see that the shoes have been polished.
But sure enough a passenger complains, irately, that his shoes have been returned without a chalk mark. Therefore, they have not been polished.
The Hartmann family, who owns the railroad, takes him in.
Katharina, the daughter, reels him in.
She warns him that she is a werewolf. But that is no matter. He has fallen for her.
She seduces him next to a model train as the patriarch Max Hartmann cuts himself in the bathtub in the basement below.
And the blood seeps into the water as the water seeps into the floor.
As with The Element of Crime, we are watching in a state of hypnosis. Dreaming while awake. We, through Leopold, have been hypnotized at the beginning of the film by none other than Max von Sydow himself.
He talks us through the experience, which we watch visually as a special effects feast.
With color objects in a black-and-white world. Black-and-white objects in a color world. Rear projection. And many more.
The filmmaking is top notch. The cinematography is crisp and beautiful. The production design is high end. The story is confusing.
But no worries. We are in a state of hypnosis. And we are on a train.
We will sit back in our trance and allow the locomotive to carry us where it will.
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
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