Beyond the Multiplex

"Manderlay": Unanswered questions about Lars von Trier's satirical slavery epic
So I went to see the second film in Lars von Trier's trilogy about America, a country he has never visited, and found it maddening, hilarious, frustrating and invigorating, pretty much from moment to moment. Grace, the earnest gamine played by Nicole Kidman two years ago in "Dogville," is played this time by Bryce Dallas Howard, a pretty, almost boyish newcomer. She and her sinister dad (Willem Dafoe) have moved on from Dogville to the Depression-era Deep South, where they comes upon a plantation whose whites are still holding its blacks as slaves, seemingly unaware that all this had been legally done away with 70 years earlier.

Grace is not the kind of girl to sit around and watch the innocent suffer with a cynical smirk on her face -- though her father certainly is -- so she's going to do something for the benighted inhabitants of "Manderlay." Performed, as in "Dogville," on a bare wooden soundstage marked with lettering ("THE OLD LADY'S GARDEN" or "THE 'BELOVED' MAGNOLIAS") and decorated with minimal props and a few cutaway theatrical sets, "Manderlay" is so obviously artificial it's difficult to take any of it at face value.

I think von Trier, as usual, is trying to manage competing impulses: He actually wants to tell this story of how and why the slaves -- led by Danny Glover as the venerable Wilhelm, and Isaach de Bankolé as the distant and hostile Timothy (to whom Grace feels an irresistible erotic attraction) -- have chosen bondage, and how Grace launches a grand social experiment to teach them the value of liberty. On the other hand, he also wants to disorder the viewer at every turn, whether by tweaking American defensiveness, provoking high-minded anti-Americanism, or simply by screwing up our ordinary expectations of what a narrative movie does and why.

To state the obvious, "Manderlay" is often patently offensive in its racial politics, and it surely isn't for everyone. It is, however, very funny, very dark and very skillfully played. Whether von Trier makes his points -- whether, indeed, he has points to make, beyond a series of insoluble conundrums -- is up for debate. So I decided I would ask him. I worked hard on setting out a series of e-mail questions, and sent them along to his publicist, who assured me that von Trier would get back to me. About two hours later, she wrote back to say he wasn't getting back to me; he was doing a video conference with filmgoers at the IFC Center in New York, and didn't have time for pesky journalists.

So here, in lieu of any further discussion of "Manderlay," is my ass-kissy e-mail to Lars von Trier, in its entirety. At first I thought I would try to channel him, and write funny but (avowedly) fake answers; it seemed like something cheeky, more or less in accord with his sense of humor. Then I realized that was a stupid idea. My questions are unanswered, and that's how they'll stay.

Next page: "Do you just think it's fun to piss people off?"