The perverse fun of the `Idiots'
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Movie review
XX 1/2 "The Idiots," with Bodil Jorgensen, Jens Albinus, Louise Hassing, Troels Lyby. Written and directed by Lars von Trier. 115 minutes. Grand Illusion. "R" - Restricted because of strong sexuality and nudity, and for language.
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In the late 1980s in Taiwan, I'd occasionally see movies that had been censored by the Kuomintang government. During nude scenes, black bars would suddenly (and comically) appear on the screen, obscuring this or that actress' better attributes. It was my first experience with overt censorship, and added to my sense that Taiwan, for all its economic progress, was rather backward socially.
Well, America: Prepare to take a giant step backward.
Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier's Dogma 95 film, "The Idiots," caused a stir at the Cannes Film Festival two years ago, and is now being released in this country. Unfortunately, black bars have been employed during various nude scenes to avoid an NC-17 rating.
What's astonishing about these black bars is their questionable sexism. Women are allowed to go full frontal, but no man can drop his trousers without a black bar appearing. For years now Hollywood films have celebrated female nudity while avoiding the male version, but this dichotomy is generally implicit, buried. "The Idiots" gives us a more equitable nudity and we respond by covering up the half we don't want to see.
The black bars, in other words, may hide Danish anatomy, but they reveal a lot about America's almost neurotic double standard.
Unfortunately, these black bars aren't the only problem with "The Idiots." The film concerns a group of twentysomething bourgeois Danes who live a communelike existence at a rich uncle's house, where they practice "spazzing," or getting in touch with their "inner idiot." Periodically they venture into society and act like the mentally impaired.
At a trip to an insulation factory, they derail the corporate tour by refusing to be led, either physically or mentally, where the tour guide wants to lead them. Afterward, one "idiot" gets behind the wheel of the group van and prepares to drive them home, much to the astonishment of the tour guide.
Why do they do this? It's comic and antisocial, certainly, a new-old way of thumbing one's nose at society - the rebirth of the village idiot. It's also a form of power. Most people will do anything not to deal with the mentally impaired. At a crowded restaurant, patrons look away in embarrassment, or hold painful, stilted conversations with "the idiots." Social pretentions are popped.
Yet this group also spazzes at home. At times, particularly at day's end when they critique one another's spazzing, they seem like actors in a workshop. At other times, spazzing seems New-Agey. It's a personal journey that each individual must take to find their "inner idiot." Stoffer (Jens Albinus), for example, the group patriarch, is an insistent and irascible idiot, while Jeppe (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) is babyish.
Most important, spazzing is a way of drinking from the river of Lethe, where adult cares are forgotten. Karen (Bodil Jorgensen), a new recruit, objects to what they are doing by saying there are people starving in the world. "There aren't people starving," Stoffer responds. "That's the whole trick."
From documentary-style, post-commune interviews with the participants, which are interspersed throughout the film, we realize that something dissolves the group. But the breakup comes with a confused whimper rather than a resounding bang, and with everyone insisting they were never as happy as they were as idiots.
It's an ending that doesn't ring true. It takes more than outdoor breakfasts on sunny mornings to make one happy, and it completely ignores Stoffer's intellectual bullying.
Besides, the concept of the "inner idiot" is so absurd as to blow up the movie from within. Individual scenes are fine, sometimes epiphanous, but they don't cohere, even with the weak glue of the post-commune interviews.