Director:
Lars von Trier
Jørgen Leth
Starring:
Jørgen Leth
Lars von Trier
Release: 26 May 04
IMDb
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The Five Obstructions
BY: DAVID PERRY
“For solitude sometimes is best society,
And short retirement urges sweet return.”
--John Milton, Paradise Lost
The devilish grin Lars von Trier gives Jørgen Leth as he plots out the
latest abstraction, err, obstruction to tackle is one that has long been a
watermark on von Trier’s career. Here’s a man who’s entire life
seems to be the musings of a misogynist artist waxing poetically on the ills
of America and capitalism. His Dogville earlier this year was the toast of
art houses because it was the audacious, in-your-face affront to Bush
doctrine foreign relations and the American Way that many people, still
energized by the Democratic presidential campaign, were waiting for.
Regardless of his politics, though, his films are universally impossible to
sit through. This is not because they are bad -- on the contrary, of nearly
a dozen films, only one, The Idiots, falls short of genius -- but because
they are built around the discomfort the director wants to create in the
audience so his insidious machinations can take affect. He’s the only sadist
filmmaker other than Michael Haneke to deserve being simultaneously
celebrated and hated for his masterworks.
The Five Obstructions, the first documentary directed by the oft-documented
von Trier, seems to be of the same mold. The director has called in his
friend and mentor Leth to Zentropa, the Danish Disneyland for misanthropes.
Having learned much of his trade from Leth, with particular devotion to the
1967 experimental short film The Perfect Human, von Trier wants to toy with
Leth by getting the man to remake The Perfect Human five times, each version
with its own series of rules to evidently provoke Leth to stumble along the
way.
Leth, I should note, is an important figure in Danish cinema, but one who
has been dormant for decades. Resigned to doing commentary on Danish TV, the
man who was his country’s answer to Chantal Akerman is a blip on the
cinematic radar these days. Even if the pretense for his return is in the
form of a controlled disaster, the return is legendary. His student
recognizes this, and, as the film begins to make clear, is provoked by the
inherent need for a reintroduction of Leth to cinema, a reunion fortuitous
to both.
I won’t divulge any of the obstructions von Trier devises for Leth since
that is part of the good humor in scenes between the two men as they
consider Leth’s last remake and prepare for the next. I will say, however,
that what Leth does with each obstruction, some of which seem impossible to
overcome, is testament to what von Trier already knows: that Jørgen Leth is
capable of any of the rules von Trier puts across. He even makes a film
within a genre that both men hate, but both agree to the artistry of Leth’s final
product.
The Five Obstructions offers one of the most intelligent dissertations on
the student-teacher relationship, and on the vitality of the forgotten artists
of the past. Lars von Trier has already chiseled his name into the film
history books by being pugnacious, audacious, and, by some accounts, insane.
With The Five Obstructions, he shows that the apple doesn’t fall far from
the tree, and that the inscription in von Trier’s entry will be shared.
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