Photo: Andrea Arnold's Red Road
Despite its promise to strip away the illusory artifice of modern cinema and reveal truth through naturalism, Lars von Trier and company's Dogma 95 project was, at heart, nothing more than a device in which the lack of traditional moviemaking elements (musical score, rigged lighting, professional actors) was itself just another form of synthetic gimmickry. Now, two of Von Trier's Zentropa Productions cohorts, Lone Scherfig and Anders Thomas Jensen, have come up with a new scheme dubbed The Advance Party, which involves three filmmakers making separate, different movies with the same actors, playing the same characters, in Scotland, of which the first is Andrea Arnold's Red Road. How the series' subsequent two entries inform Arnold's effort remains to be seen, but on its own, the English director's directorial debut (and first follow-up to her Oscar-winning 2003 short Wasp) is a hybrid of Dogma verité aesthetics and manipulative storytelling, a conflict her intermittently bracing film never properly reconciles. Nick Schager
Despite its promise to strip away the illusory artifice of modern cinema and reveal truth through naturalism, Lars von Trier and company's Dogma 95 project was, at heart, nothing more than a device in which the lack of traditional moviemaking elements (musical score, rigged lighting, professional actors) was itself just another form of synthetic gimmickry. Now, two of Von Trier's Zentropa Productions cohorts, Lone Scherfig and Anders Thomas Jensen, have come up with a new scheme dubbed The Advance Party, which involves three filmmakers making separate, different movies with the same actors, playing the same characters, in Scotland, of which the first is Andrea Arnold's Red Road. How the series' subsequent two entries inform Arnold's effort remains to be seen, but on its own, the English director's directorial debut (and first follow-up to her Oscar-winning 2003 short Wasp) is a hybrid of Dogma verité aesthetics and manipulative storytelling, a conflict her intermittently bracing film never properly reconciles. Nick Schager
