FOR no EYES ONLY
Introducing the movie no one wants you to see. Is Lars von Trier’s new film too controversial for Canadian audiences?
Dead of night in mid-October, brisk and drizzling. More than 400 people are seated in the Rio Theatre in East Vancouver, an opulent movie-house from the 1930s. About to begin is a second sold-out showing of Lars von Trier’s new film The House That Jack Built, as part of the Altered States program at the Vancouver International Film Festival.
Moments before showtime, sipping craft beer from plastic cups, the audience is exuberant. As well they should be. They are about to watch a great movie: one of von Trier’s best, his most cunning and sophisticated, a grim treatise full of black humour and ugly, unsparing truth. But it’s more exciting than that. This crowd, as it happens, are among a select lucky few who will have the privilege of actually seeing this film in a cinema in Canada.
Why has the most challenging and original movie of the year effectively vanished from existence before anyone has had the chance to watch it? I have been bewildered by this question since the Toronto International Film Festival revealed its September lineup in late summer and The House That Jack Built was inexplicably nowhere to be found.
The House That Jack Built is at once a movie about a serial killer and a movie about movies about serial killers. It contains great amounts of graphic violence, largely inflicted against women, and is moreover about screen violence, and screen violence against women in particular. It portrays, exhaustingly over nearly two-and-a-halfhours, every conceivable cruelty and evil, and indeed plays many of its most repugnant acts as slapstick, almost daring you to either laugh or scream. The sum effect is nauseating. And it makes you think seriously, very seriously, about ideas that are by nature difficult to consider.
Jack — murdering under the self-adopted alias Mr. Sophistication, played with irrepressible fervour by Matt Dillon, and serving as transparent alter-ego for von Trier — is an architect. He has an eye for design and a mind for philosophy. He kills, and also studies killing, exploring its possibilities and cogitating on its logistics and problems.
His butchery starts cold and slowly gets conceptual; so does von Trier’s, as the movie traces a series of grisly “incidents” that increase in horror as well as intelligent rationale. For as Jack kills, he also muses and reflects, discussing what he’s done and why he’s done it with an unseen co-narrator, played by Bruno Ganz. The killings are vile and outrageous. But it’s the conversations that truly unnerve — because it happens that thinking about this stuff is even more demanding than watching it unfold. Too demanding, perhaps. Industry rumour suggests the powers that be at TIFF expressly prohibited the programming team from considering the film not long after its controversial world premiere in May at Cannes — a firm edict intended, I suppose, to wash the festival’s hands of any turbulence it might otherwise invite by association.
Whether TIFF really did snub von Trier to avoid conflict at a time of heightened sensitivity in the arts is hard to prove; major festivals are not in the habit of corroborating unfavourable gossip. (An in-house publicist told me simply that “TIFF does not comment on films that are not selected for the Festival.”) In any case, TIFF elected not to screen The House That Jack Built. Other than Vancouver, almost no festivals did.
The House That Jack Built has a distributor, unlike many other worthy films that, for reasons of obscurity or niche appeal, disappear soon after their arrival on the festival circuit. It was acquired out of Cannes by Toronto-based Mongrel Media, owing to an exclusive arrangement with their American counterpart IFC Films. But Mongrel will not be opening the film theatrically in Canada. It will screen twice in Montreal, on the 27 th and 28th of November; it will play in Toronto only once, at Hot Docs, at close to midnight on December 1st, and then, it will then go straight to video-on-demand services.
Was Mongrel confronted by the same hostility from local cinemas that they faced across the festival circuit? Or were they apprehensive about releasing a film that seems almost preordained to offend? Reached for comment, a representative from the organization said only that they “feel this is the optimal release plan for this specific film.”
Optimal for whom? Not Canadian moviegoers, who will be denied the pleasure of enjoying this excellent film on the big screen. But perhaps there is a certain advantage to the distributor in suppression — the advantage of circumventing the controversy that beleaguered von Trier at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, where both audience members present for his film’s red-carpet premiere and professional film critics stormed out of its screening drunk on indignation.
What publicist wants to open the newspaper opening weekend to find a two-page editorial lambasting those responsible for condoning an immoral work? Safer to shepherd the would-be cause celebre to the iTunes store quietly and hope that nobody notices your affiliation. Festivals, too, would rather evade any risk of public umbrage. Who could blame TIFF for rebuffing von Trier, given the outrage von Trier can hardly help arousing?
Except, of course, film festivals are supposed to foster thought and encourage reflection. Arousing outrage is a risk inherent to the job. Probably some people who saw The House That Jack Built in Vancouver loathed it; but Vancouver gave them the opportunity to see it in the first place. The festival trusted them to determine its merits for themselves — as adults. That’s good programming.
Certainly, no festival or distributor or theatre is obliged to program any particular film — and there are plenty of unsensational reasons why The House That Jack Built might have been passed over by Toronto et al. Still, when a film this provocative — and this good — languishes in oblivion before being dumped on VOD, it’s hard not to chalk it up to widespread industry cowardice.
Given the festivals afraid of its depravity; distributors alarmed by its capacity to provoke; and even critics driven to flee by its wickedness, one would think, sight unseen, that The House That Jack Built is a movie of unspeakable brutality and perversion, a noholds-barred horror show engineered to disturb and appall. Not so. Not even, I was surprised to find, by von Trier’s standards: where one might reasonably have accused the director of Dogville and Dancer in the Dark before of delighting in the misery of his characters or in the discomfort of his audience, here those criticisms ring hollow.
Yes, The House That Jack Built concerns a serial killer. It is, as one might imagine, often extremely violent and deeply upsetting. Gruesome though its images may be, they are never gratuitous. Much in the movie shocks; nothing shocking is meaningless. The carnage is always in service of the point.
The point is a kind of taxonomy of violence and horror in art — a big, sweeping disquisition on morality, creation and destruction, on the responsibility of artists and the corruption of power it requires to create. It seems to me especially crazy to reject von Trier’s films on the grounds of its violence and depravity, because the artistic value of this violence and depravity is the very subject of the film: he is inviting us to think about and work through these ideas, not merely rubbing our noses in scandal, and the film festival and the movie theatre are the ideal places to perform this valuable work.
Von Trier isn’t willing to proceed in these times without radical self interrogation, whose conclusion he never takes for granted. Why should we wriggle out of it either? “This movie mistreats its female characters” is a brain-dead answer to questions of representation and ethics the movie itself is posing.
You can disagree with the arguments von Trier mounts in his defence — he seems to want us to — but to dismiss the case without hearing it out is quite simply spineless.