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1992-09-22
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REVIEWS, Page 90CINEMAThe Third Man Scheme
By RICHARD CORLISS
TITLE: Zentropa
DIRECTOR: Lars von Trier
WRITERS: Lars von Trier and Niels Vorsel
THE BOTTOM LINE: The staid European cinema comes alive
with an epic as big and mysterious as the Continent.
There is a new style in European cinema -- finally. For
three decades, since Michelangelo Antonioni and Robert Bresson
made anomie fashionable, European directors have dreamed -- or
nightmared -- small. Their movies are dyspeptic miniatures:
people sitting at a kitchen table, silent, sullen, waiting for
the worst. Everybody, on both sides of the camera, has the
glums. The camerabatic dazzle of, say, the French New Wave is
now politically incorrect -- as if displaying any effervescence
of imagination would betray a yearning for Hollywood's technical
and narrative know-how. So the European cinema has aged like a
movie star who retired decades ago. The question isn't even,
"When did she die?" Instead it's, "Oh, is she still alive?"
Zentropa gives signs that the answer is yes. This
existential melodrama was originally known as Europa, and Danish
director Lars von Trier's ambition is that vast: Continent-wide.
Set on a German train rumbling through the rubble of World War
II -- but suggesting the recent chaos of post-communist Europe
-- Zentropa plays like a hallucinogenic remake of The Third Man.
A naive American, Leo (Jean-Marc Barr), walks into a web of
political duplicity spun by a desperate provocateuse (Barbara
Sukowa), a cynical Allied officer (Eddie Constantine) and lots
of supporting sharks and werewolves. And where is Harry Lime,
the charming, murderous third man? Everywhere. Everyone has
something to prove or hide -- everyone but Leo. Which makes him,
in the movie's seen-it-all eyes, the real villain. The elemental
crime is to take no side, to do nothing.
Von Trier will never be nailed on that rap. He
passionately promotes himself and European movies. At last
year's Cannes festival, when this film lost out to the Hollywood
comedy Barton Fink, Von Trier threw a snit fit, angrily claiming
that his movie was bolder and better. He was right. Zentropa
plunders the film vocabulary -- back projection and
superimposition, black-and-white with shrieks of color -- to
anchor its weirdness in classical technique. The legerdemain
reminds you of the artificial nature of movies even as it draws
you back to the era when pictures seduced the audience into a
communal trance.
Like The Nasty Girl from Germany, Toto le Heros from
Belgium and Delicatessen from France, Zentropa finds movie
energy in spiritual malaise. These films take their cue from the
dystopic visions of Blade Runner and Brazil -- pictures set in
the future but cluttered with decor from the film noir past. The
imagery possesses a kind of dour voluptuousness: bleak and busy.
Their crammed, skewed compositions excite the eye. These movies
won't push Lethal 3 off the multiplex screen; they can't compete
with Hollywood product. And that is the happy point. They are
appealingly strange -- different from the American behemoths
but, unlike most examples of European cine-minimalism, not less.
Zentropa is the strangest. It has the overweening will to
be a masterpiece and the verve nearly to carry it off. Big,
enthralling and, frankly, nuts, Zentropa gives notice that
European cinema is alive and kicking, one more time.