Movie critics love to ascribe the title “enfant terrible” to any director whose bad behavior threatens to eclipse his work. Maybe in the current day and age, being an enfant terrible carries more of a stigma, but when Lars von Trier started out in the ‘80s, this sort of “bad boy” behavior was often celebrated. Today, “enfant terrible” more likely means that someone is a little shit, and von Trier is the proud owner of an entire “controversies” section on his Wikipedia page. That said, it is undeniable the man has made some of the most indelible films of the past 40 years, beginning with his mesmerizing and difficult Europe Trilogy.
Though not linked by story, von Trier’s first three films – The Element of Crime (1984), Epidemic (1987) and Europa (1991) – thematically examine a Europe that is still reeling from the trauma inflicted upon its people in the first half of the 20th century. Less linear and grand than the director’s more recent work, the Europe Trilogy feels like a hallucination, a sepia-toned nightmare sprung from the recesses of the Danish director’s darkest musings.
The best-known movie of the bunch is The Element of Crime, a film that received many accolades but also confounded some critics on its release. Despite a nomination for the Palme d’Or and winning the Technical Grand Prize, The Element of Crime polarized audiences at Cannes. The film possesses a hypnotic hold, but it can also be easily dismissed as aping Tarkovsky. Still, the movie is all about potential, something von Trier lived up to with later masterpieces, Breaking the Waves (1996), Dancer in the Dark (2000) and Melancholia (2011).
Despite being called part of the Europe Trilogy, being set in Germany and made by a Danish director, The Element of Crime is in English. von Trier infuses the film with elements of noir – from the voiceover of his protagonist Fisher (Michael Elphick) to the twisty mystery about a German detective in Cairo who undergoes hypnosis to remember a murder case in Europe from years before. The film even begins with a shot of donkey in distress, a clear nod to both Tarkovsky and Robert Bresson.
Fisher is under the influence of an Egyptian therapist (Ahmed El Shenawi), whose voice sometimes interrupts his narration, asking questions or challenging whether the detective is telling the truth or not. We only glimpse the therapist at the beginning from the perspective of Fisher, looming over us, monkey on his shoulder like some villain from an Indiana Jones film. von Trier makes us see through Fisher’s eyes, and everything is sepia-toned, shot with sodium-vapor lighting.
We must remember what we see is through the hypnotized eyes of Fisher. The recollected Europe of The Element of Crime is a broken place, a realm of delusion and implausibility. Everything seems broken. The earth feels like it could shift and crumble into nightmare at any time. We glimpse frightening visions of death and degradation. This is Europe seen through the apocalypse, one that von Trier not only relishes, but infuses with dark humor.
Fisher has spent more than a decade away from Europe in Cairo but a short visit has left him in a state of devastation. He asks the therapist to regress him so he can understand where the trauma is coming from. By taking him back to Europe through his memory, the therapist pledges to discover just why the detective is so devastated by his recent sojourn.
The Europe of Fisher’s memory isn’t a kind place. Instead, it’s more like the totalitarian state of George Orwell’s 1984, but nothing appears to function properly. Everyone is grimy, sweating in various states of struggle or repression in decrepit buildings. None of them are happy to see Fisher, a former policeman who had been living overseas, but recalled back to help catch a serial killer preying on young girls who sell lottery tickets. Fisher doesn’t jibe with his new boss, Kramer (Jerold Wells), who loves to shout through a megaphone and harass his subordinates.
The film takes its title from a tome about unorthodox policing by Osborne (Esmond Knight), Fisher’s ancient and disgraced teacher. Rather than adhere to Kramer’s fascist tactics, Fisher looked up his old mentor and begins using his method: in order to understand a criminal, one must retrace his exact footsteps and try to get into his mind.
Soon, a dead man named Harry Grey emerges as the prime suspect and Fisher decides to follow his path through von Trier’s nightmarish vision of Europe. His camera, led by cinematographer Tom Elling, weaves in and out of one rundown building after another as Fisher follows Grey’s trail. He even meets up with Kim (Me Me Lai), a prostitute that has ties with Grey. Fisher takes on Grey’s persona with relish, even telling Kim to he is going to fuck her “back to the Stone Age” before indulging in some of Grey’s pleasures.
Von Trier is clearly a student of cinema, and he constantly refers to past films with this debt. From the aforementioned Tarkovsky (the subterranean world of Stalker) to Fritz Lang (whose M also observes child murder in a seedy underworld) to Carol Reed (The Third Man is also a hallucinogenic look at the underbelly of a European city), the director throws in callbacks and motifs from his idols, despite striking out on his own aesthetic in more recent movies.
There are also echoes of The Element of Crime in later von Trier films–defenestration, death of children, the breaking down of society and its conventions. But this is von Trier at his most noir. If anything, the 2019 video game Disco Elysium shares the same DNA, down to the gruff narration and mind-bending plot twists. This is the movie that established and enabled this enfant most terrible. It’s a difficult ride but for cineastes it is one worth taking.
The post Revisit: The Element of Crime appeared first on Spectrum Culture.