The Element of Crime

Saw The Element of Crime, an incomprehensible film by Lars von Trier. He's cribbing pretty hard from Tarkovsky, heavily borrowing his favorite images of stagnant water and eternal, soggy rain. The film is set in some retro-future Europe, where everything is waterlogged and lit by lanterns. a network of pneumatic tubes acts as mail and a perpetual under-class of coal-miners and lottery-ticket-sellers play an illegal bungee-jumping game/ritual. I found the film to be almost completely incomprehensible.

It follows a cop whose been called out of retirement to track down the lotto-murderer, a string of murders of little girls. He follows the footsteps of the killer, retracing his actions and movements. He begins to lose track of his identity, the imaginary killer taking over more and more (you might be able to see where this is going.) The film is very slow and ponderous, full of strange and bewildering symbolism and imagery. There's a repeated image of people sleeping on beds littered with forks, or keys, or surgical equipment, or other strange objects. There's a repeated image of dead horses, possibly linked to their oblique references to hoof-and-mouth disease. At one point, some characters in the background literally beat a dead horse.

This cheap shot aside, the film is interesting. Morbid and oblique, it was too opaque for me to really follow, but was clearly driving at something. I suppose anyway. Maybe von trier was just messing about, indulging in empty sensation and spectacle. I wouldn't know either way. I generally like von Trier, but had to struggle to stay awake through this one. This is my reaction to most Tarkovsky films however, so maybe it's just a good copy-cat. Either way, I think I may have to someday return to this one to find out what it was about, exactly. For now it just too out there for even me.