Blu-ray Review: Lars von Trier’s Europe Trilogy on the Criterion Collection

Before he stripped it all away and, in what can now be taken as a mere blip in the overall timeline, momentarily embraced the rigid ethos of the Dogme 95 movement, Danish enfant terrible Lars von Trier trafficked in the sort of stylistic maximalism characteristic of an era that was, broadly speaking, shrugging off some of the dominance of New Hollywood, direct cinema, and Third Cinema. Filmmakers like von Trier—alongside Krzysztof Kieślowski, Wim Wenders, Emir Kusturica, and even recalibrating older titans like Akira Kurosawa—were bathing their mise-en-scène in such artifice that it almost felt like a form of repudiation.

Especially in the case of von Trier, whose entire career has been an object lesson in opposition—opposition to propriety, opposition to decorum, opposition to taste. But not, at least in the early stretch, opposition to fashion. Viewed in succession, the three films of von Trier’s “Europe Trilogy,” as newly presented in the Criterion Criterion’s box set, feel unmistakably like the works of someone who had yet to truly find their own voice, and instead marked time behind a curtain of eye-catching subterfuge. Certainly they’re the works of a director who cared a lot less about the identity of Europe than he did being regarded as a great new European stylist.

Not that it’s a deal-breaker, at least off the top. The Element of Crime, von Trier’s 1984 debut feature, is at first blush a duly atmospheric neo-noir phantasmagoria depicting the memories of a disillusioned detective, Fisher (Michael Elphick), bent on reliving his final case, in which he tried to crack a series of child murders. Shot in sodium light, so as to give its images an oppressive putrescence, the film pulls few stylistic punches even as it seems in no particular rush to move forward the story, a dichotomy that’s consistently unnerving.

The pacing and the psychological profile of Fisher keep us at arm’s length even as the brashness of the film’s aesthetic rope us back in. It would be a neat trick if it weren’t patently clear that everything that The Element of Crime attempts was profoundly bested by Michael Mann’s “getting inside the mind of a killer” masterpiece Manhunter a couple years down the road.

But it’s at least palatable. By contrast, Epidemic clears a space around itself as the trilogy’s unequivocal weak link, a chronically confused matrix of metaphors and bad faith—and a spiritual ancestor to the grandstanding but simultaneously charming The Five Obstructions a few decades hence. Presented almost as an alien declassified document from a universe where filmmaking only serves to comment upon the act of filmmaking, the 1987 film finds von Trier turning the camera on himself as he and collaborators work to bang out a story about a plague.

Meanwhile, a more-or-less “real” plague, symbolic of the sickness of a continent still wrestling with the horrors of the two world wars, nibbles away at the margins of the filmmakers’ existence. It’s not von Trier’s ideas or ambition that are at fault in his sophomore feature so much as his presumptuousness in placing gamesmanship in pole position. (One need only contrast this project’s too-muchness against von Trier’s television side project Medea, based on a Carl Theodor Dreyer script adaptation of Euripides’s ancient Greek tragedy, to see just how much stood to be gained with just a modicum of discipline.)

Which brings the trilogy to its apotheosis in 1991’s Europa. This fever dream of the wreckage of postwar Europe begins with a portentous Max von Sydow voiceover—not really narration but the commands of a hypnotist/god—as railroad tracks illuminated by a locomotive headlight whiz by. The putative addressee, Leopold Kessler (Jean-Marc Barr), is a naïf who arrives in a ruined (and ruinous) Germany in the fall of 1945. From there, things get progressively more surface-bound and artsy, as metaphors pile up faster than the film’s copious process shots.

It’s fair to at least respect Europa as a marked stylistic leap forward for Von Trier. It has a singular look dominated by the actors’ placement in a multi-planed mise-en-scène employing front and rear projection, restless tracking shots, and a few lurid intrusions of color (the reds of blood and emergency brakes) in its silver-and-gray, eternal-night monochrome. But despite its visual flair and outrageous episodes, Europa’s total effect is one of prettified, hollowed-out Kafka. Its playfulness and sleight of camera evoke wartime romantic thrillers like Casablanca rather than build a resonant metaphor for German guilt and accountability. Von Trier and his three cinematographers here fashion a handmade, retro pastiche with a small, dried-out heart.

You can palpably feel the aspiring auteur reaching the sort of dead end that could only be resolved through a phase of self-imposed oblivion. When Leopold walks through his train and encounters visions of concentration camp-bound prisoners in “carriages [he] never knew existed,” it feels cheap; the tragedy of the Nazi era is obscured by the film’s ostentatious arsenal of tricks and toys. Thankfully, both the tricks and the toys would soon achieve heights that these three early films could only hint around, once von Trier could bring himself to wake the hell up.

Image/Sound

While it feels as though this particular Criterion release is the result of provenance (in terms of what rights were available and for what means), you can’t say that they didn’t work overtime to best-available exhibits upon which to perform the postmortems. Europa, in particular, has been given a remarkable 4K restorative upgrade from the prior DVD issue. The interplay of grayscale, primary color, and rear-projection are tactile and pulse-pounding, enough to actually lift the film’s iffy intentions into something resembling enlightenment. The other two films were given 3K restorations, and they too look as good as they likely could. The Element of Crime, obviously, has the headline-snatching yellows to dwell upon, but the full range of Epidemic’s blacks, whites, and in-betweens (and that damned watermark) get the royal treatment here. None of the soundtracks are going to give your home sound system much of a workout. The first two films’ monaural tracks are workmanlike and solid, but Europa’s stereo mix offers a comparatively sharp panoply of sound effects, Joachim Holbek’s Herrmannesque score, and the unnerving intonations of Max von Sydow. In all, very much an upgrade in the audio-video department.

Extras

If you get through the entire trilogy and think to yourself, “These are movies made by people who want to tell you a thing or two,” you’d be very much right. Between the three films, Criterion has worked up five discrete commentary tracks. While decorum would suggest that you veer toward the ones that don’t feature Lars von Trier, the truth of the matter is he’s still an entertaining gadfly and, if we were to pick a personal favorite, it would be the one he shares with Peter Aalbæk Jensen on Europa. When the latter tells the former that Europa was “back when the pictures mattered to you,” it’s undeniably endearing. Equally amusing is the option you’re given to compare notes about what Udo Kier was up to on the set, as Kier joins Jean-Marc Barr on a separate, select-scene track. (Let’s just say that Kier wasn’t above utilizing substances to help his eccentric performances materialize.) Von Trier is present on commentary tracks for all three films, and arguably the experience of listening to him chat about these films is as rewarding, if not more, than watching the films outright (the first two, particularly).

Otherwise, the set serves as a means of collecting a bunch of disparate, previously produced bonus features in a convenient one-stop shop. There’s nothing new here, aside from an expanded version of critic Howard Hampton’s (reliably pugnacious) booklet essay, which assesses the “Europe Trilogy” as a glorious mess that’s always teetering on the edge of self-destruction, which in Hampton’s world is an unmitigated compliment.

Elsewhere, there are making-of documentaries, interviews with von Trier that span the decades (spoiler alert: the director himself would come to renounce these three films), and a pair of student shorts directed by the filmmaker in the early ’80s. Fans are likely to prefer Stig Bjorkman’s Tranceformer: A Portrait of Lars von Trier and the Europa making-of featurette above all else, whereas skeptics are directed to sample Bo Green Jensen’s 2005 interview with the director, where, so far as we’re concerned, his 20-20 hindsight is very much astute.

Overall

For those who don’t regard Lars von Trier’s early “Europe Trilogy” films as a phase that he just had to go through in order to arrive at the glories of Breaking the Waves and Dogville, Criterion’s handsomely repackaged set is a must-own.