Europa

source: Europa

That was the first thing that sprang to mind as I watched the closing credits to Europa make there was across the screen, never in my entire life have I seen a film of such technical genius, the visuals of Europa are so impressive that any film I watch in it's wake will only pale in comparison, forget your Michael Bay, Ridley Scott slick Hollywood cinematography, Europa has more ethereal beauty than anything those two could conjure up in a million years. Now I'd be the first to hail Lars von Trier a genius just off the back of his films Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark, but this is stupid, the fact that Europa has gone un-noticed by film experts for so long is a crime against cinema, whilst overrated rubbish like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Life is Beautiful clean up at the academy awards (but what do the know) Europa has been hidden away, absent form video stores and (until recently) any British TV channels. The visuals in Europa are not MTV gloss; it's not a case of style over substance, its more a case of substance dictating style. Much like his first film The Element of Crime, von Trier uses the perspective of the main character to draw us into his world, and much like Element, the film begins with the main character (or in the case of Europa, we the audience) being hypnotized. As we move down the tracks, the voice of the Narrator (Max von Sydow) counts us down into a deep sleep, until we awake in Europa. This allows von Trier and his three cinematographers to pay with the conventions of time and imagery, there are many scenes in Europa when a character in the background, who is in black and white, will interact with a person in the foreground who will be colour, von Trier is trying to show us how much precedence the coloured item or person has over the plot, for instance, it's no surprise that the first shot of Leopold Kessler (Jean-marc Barr) is in colour, since he is the only character who's actions have superiority over the film. The performances are good, they may not be on par with performances in later von Trier films, but that's just because the images are sometimes so distracting that you don't really pick up on them the first time round. But I would like to point out the fantastic performance of Jean-Marc Barr in the lead role, whose blind idealism is slowly warn down by the two opposing sides, until he erupts in the films final act. Again, muck like The Element of Crime, the film ends with our hero unable to wake up from his nightmare state, left in this terrible place, with only the continuing narration of von Sydow to seal his fate. Europa is a tremendous film, and I cant help thinking what a shame that von Trier has abandoned this way of filming, since he was clearly one of the most talented visual directors working at that time, Europa, much like the rest of his cinematic cannon is filled with a wealth of iconic scenes. His dedication to composition and mise-en-scene is unrivalled, not to mention his use of sound and production design. But since his no-frills melodramas turned out to be Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark then who can argue, but it does seems like a waste of an imaginative talent. 10/10

I cannot stay indifferent to Lars van Trier's films. I consider 'Breaking the Waves' nothing less than a masterpiece. I loved 'Dancer in the Night'. I admired the idea in 'Dogville' but the overall exercise looked to me too dry and too theatrical, less cinema. 'Europa' which I see only now was a famous film at its time, succeeded in the US the relative success of an European film and got the Oscar for the best foreign language movie, but did not survive well the time in my opinion. It is also a too much explicit and extrovert exercise in cinema art to my taste. The story has a level of ambiguity that cannot escape the viewer. Treating the period that immediately followed the second world war not in the black and white colors of victors and vanquished, of executioners and victims but as rather ambiguous times when people of both sides were fighting for survival in the aftermath of a catastrophic event that change the lives of nations and individuals forever is still a source of disputes even today, more such was novel and courageous two decades ago. Yet it is the means of expression that really do not appear fit to the task. The film seems to include a lot of quotes descending directly from the films of Hitchcock, especially his early films set in the pre-war Europe, with brave British spies fighting evil German spies on trains crossing at high speed the continent at dark. The trains were a symbol of the world and its conflicts with all their intensity and dramatism. Here the train also becomes the symbol of the first sparkles of the re-birth of Germany after war, of its might, of its obsession with order and regulation, of punctuality and civility. The characters that populate the train are far from being the classical spy stories good or bad guys. The principal character a young American of German origin coming to post-war Europe willing to be part of a process of help and reconciliation finds himself in an ambiguous world of destruction and corruption, with liberators looking more like oppressive occupiers, with the vanquished not resigned to their fate but rather willing to continue on the path of self-destruction, with love doubtfully mixed with treason. It is yet this classical film treatment that betrays the director in this case. The actions of the characters, especially of Leopold Kessler played by Jean-Marc Barr seem confused, and lack credibility. The overall cinematography seems to be not Hitchcock-like but rather from a bad imitation of Hitchcock in the late 30s. The usage of color over the black-and-white film used in the majority of the time in moments of emotional intensity is also too demonstrative. It is not that Van Trier does not master his artistic means, but he is too demonstrative, he seems to try too hard to show what a great filmmaker he is. He really is great, as he will show in some of his later films, but it will be left to the viewers to decide this alone.

By making this entire film appear to be in slow motion, by peopling it with cardboard characters who don't resemble human beings, by a hilariously poor attempt to represent the attitude of any Americans or Germans at the end of the Second World War, and by failing in an apparent attempt to "surprise" the viewer (though believe me, there are no surprises to anyone who has seen a few films), von Trier succeeds in making a film that works best as simply a series of black and white still photographs. This is just so tedious, so absurd, so much the opposite of anything passing for art or thought or entertainment, that I dare the viewer to watch it straight through in one sitting. There is so much offensive in this movie - from the idiotic attempt to symbolize the representatives of the most sophisticated and historically aware country on earth (the United States) to the sad attempt to portray the much over-aged witch-like Barbara Sukowa as a femme fatale;, from the return to the bizarre racism of Fassbinder in always showing American MPs as black, to the tedious cliche of Germans as fanatically punctilious - this is an awful thing. Don't see it. It's just pathetic.

This is certainly not the best von Trier but his apocalyptic vision of Germany of 1945 with the humiliations of the Germans by the Americans and the chaos is correct. The Zentropa railways are still functioning with the typical German "gründlichkeit" and this gives the movie some funny scenes when Leopold Kessler is interrupted at different occasions when he has to respond to questions when making his exam of train-guard and sleeping-quarters controller. At one moment he stops the train and shouts: "I do not want to go to Bremen, Frankfurt or Auschwitz, I need to think!". I must admit I didn't see the movie on screen but on television, so I cannot judge the technical superposition of black and white against colour. The script is very poor and is basically that Leopold Kessler (Jean-Marc Barr, he speaks American and German but he does not act like one of them) is used by the Wehrwolf organisation (which in reality never existed apart from some murders) to put an explosive on a train. He will be deceived as well by Colonel Harris (Eddie Constantine) as by the wife he later marries Katharina Hartmann (Barbara Sukowa). More than half of the movie is spend on a train going on so slowly that Kessler can catch it again and climb in it. Belief is important in the movie as one says: "For me the war was lost time as I do not belief." and another character says: "Priests are a necessary evil!". My idea is that nobody has a "soul" in this movie; Kessler himself perhaps? Kessler has no personality and one wonders what he is after ultimately. The voice of Max von Sydow does not help us either as it more something like an inner voice coming from heaven. This movie is completely in the dark, you never see some light which is contributing to a strange unearthly atmosphere. There is no real plot as Kessler only acts at the end of the movie, disturbed by the train-guard and the examination commission of the railways. In fact he acts against himself: the bomb is there to explode because otherwise he looses his wife but we have to guess that he was just misguided by the deviations... and so on. I got the impression that nobody really is alive in this movie and that everybody acts like in a nightmare. Lars von Trier is mixing a strange plot and his psychotic vision on mankind which makes this movie very bizarre.

With stunning cinematography and a thread of Kafkaesque absurdity, this movie had me from the simple yet fascinating opening scene. The movie plays much like a dream, and I think that may be why people either hate it or love it. Characters are drawn superficially and the story itself is slight and perhaps a little pointless. But these are failings of the movie but conscious choices. The film works isn't trying to work as history, but rather is a deconstruction of 1940s war movies. I would have trouble arguing that there was much real substance to the movie, but the movie is such a cinematic wonder that I was completely swept away. This is one of the most beautifully filmed movies ever, and there is a wild imagination in its style. I can completely understand why people would hate it, but I give it 9/10.

A few years ago, a friend got from one of his other friends a video with the Michael Mann film 'Heat' on it. After we finished that movie, and were about to stand up, we saw that there is another film just after, tough on the cassette's envelope the owner didn't write it up. Yet we were all glued back to our seats by its distinct opening, which lacked credits. Some two hours later, I just sat there wondering: how could I not have heard of this masterpiece before?... This film was Europa. Lars von Trier woke film noir from the dead, deconstructed reality with intentionally obvious sets, yet often there was haunting similarity with post-war German photographs I saw. And then the tricky cuts! The story itself is a hard-to-take moral odyssey that has no happy end. A young American pacifist of German descent comes to post-war Germany, intent on doing some good to pay for the bombs his countrymen dropped. But he mostly meets distrust and self-destructive defiance. He hires with Zentropa, a dining-and-sleeping-car company (modeled on Mitropa), whose owner is one of the Nazi collaborators the Occupiers whitewash. Our hero falls in love with his daughter - who later turns out to be a member of the Werewolf, Nazi post-war terrorists. When he doesn't understand the world (or just Europeans) anymore, in his rage he blows up a railroad bridge under a train which he just saved. As a final note, for historical correctness: in the real world, the Werewolf were nowhere as important as the film implies, they were mostly a final Nazi propaganda coup. After an SS unit assassinated the major of Allied-occupied Aachen, two months before the capitulation, the Nazis announced the creation of whole legions of saboteurs and terrorists who will be ready to fight behind the lines, the Werewolf. But only a few hundred of mostly Hitler Youth received some training, and while two or three times some were deployed to murder suspected communists or forced-labourer foreigners in Bavarian villages to imprint lasting fear on inhabitants, with Hitler's death and the war's end it all fell apart. However, the Werewolf propaganda had a profound effect on the occupiers. They feared the Werewolf everywhere, suspected it behind any serious accident - but without exception another cause was found later (ignored by some recent pseudo-historians). For example, when a gas main exploded in the police HQ of bombed-out Bremen, or when the Soviet military commander died in a motorbike accident in Berlin. The effect was strongest on the Soviets, who arrested tens of thousands (in large part children!) 'preemptively' on suspicion of being Werewolf, and closed them off in prison camps where a lot of them died.

In 1995, Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg created what is known as the 'Dogma 95 Manifesto'--a series of rules that these and other Danish avant-garde film makers would adhere to the in the future. I mention this because although "Europa" was made by von Trier, the film does not at all adhere to these rules--as the film was made four years before this film movement was deliberately created. Von Trier's use of black & white film (interposed throughout the film with muted color), sets, incidental music, non-hand held camera, the use of a crane for a few shots and setting the film in the past were all techniques he would eschew only four years later. I guess he was just getting it out of his system! The beginning of "Europa" is very, very strange. You hear the voice of Max Von Sydow and he leads the audience in a hypnotic induction--taking you back to the year 1945--just after WWII. And, later, you will once again hear the voice of Von Sydow talking throughout the film like a hypnotherapist--a VERY unusual way to narrate this film. The film plot revolves around an odd and rather non-emotive American, Leopold Kessler. It seems that he was a pacifist during the war and has moved to Germany to work for the railroad. This is odd, I know, but it gets a lot more unusual than that... I would try to explain the story, but frankly it all becomes very surreal and a bit weird. Additionally, while the film is supposed to be about a group of post-war terrorists named 'Werewolves', the film does NOT attempt to provide an actual history lesson or really discuss their actions. My advice is like all surreal films, don't try to understand it or make sense out of why von Trier made it--just absorb it and make of it what you will (or not). My feeling about the film is that I liked it because of its bizarreness and innovative cinematography. Sure, there are a few sloppy portions (such as the dubbing of the Colonel's voice) but what's important is that this film was made in 1991. Using computers to make this sort of project would be pretty easy today--but back in 1991 personal computers were still a bit rare and amazingly underpowered. Yet, von Trier was able to use black & white mixed with occasional splashes of grainy color--a difficult trick in its day. There are also very very beautiful camera shots throughout the film (such as the bombed out church in the snow) which are achieved through superimposing characters into scenes he shot previously. Totally weird, confusing but visually arresting. This is NOT a film for the average person--they probably wouldn't have the patience or would demand a more coherent and traditional plot. But, it's the sort of thing that is worth seeing once--it's that unusual and unique. The style, the narration, the cinematography and the music provide a once in a lifetime sort of experience. If you get the DVD, be sure to see if it has the French documentary "The Making of 'Europa'", as it explains the various very innovative camera tricks that were used. Additionally, just how complicated it all was to make is revealed...and it took two years to make!

Zentropa has much in common with The Third Man, another noir-like film set among the rubble of postwar Europe. Like TTM, there is much inventive camera work. There is an innocent American who gets emotionally involved with a woman he doesn't really understand, and whose naivety is all the more striking in contrast with the natives. But I'd have to say that The Third Man has a more well-crafted storyline. Zentropa is a bit disjointed in this respect. Perhaps this is intentional: it is presented as a dream/nightmare, and making it too coherent would spoil the effect. This movie is unrelentingly grim--"noir" in more than one sense; one never sees the sun shine. Grim, but intriguing, and frightening.

Ok, ok, enough already. Just watched this movie and it gave me a f***ing headache. This time, Mr. von Trier has really overdone that artsy-stylish-oh-so-existentialist-decline-of- Central-Europe kind of thing of his. At the end, when the main protagonist dies, you just shrug your shoulders. What's the point? You didn't care about any of the characters anyway. The cinematography: So it's dark and gloomy, and sometimes there's this weird technicolor. Oh well. What it all comes down to is that this movie is (surprisingly) unoriginal, even uninspired in my humble opinion. All right, maybe you can call it kafkaesque. Never liked Kafka anyway for that matter. In the end, a bottle of Vodka can give you much more delusion and visual effects than this film ever hoped to achieve. Plus, it can make you just as depressed if you drink it alone.