Film Reviews

The Letter F is for Fibinoccia

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Cheap arse art house feature at The Ritzy comes in at three quid, two with my FRIENDS card. If only they could have Joey sell me the ticket I'd be a pig in shite. Todays offering, a remarkably cerebral effort from scary old Lars von Trier!

Five Obstructions, The (Fem benspaend, De)
[Jorgen Leth, Lars von Trier, 90',2003, PG] 3Feb04

One part making of a movie to one part five shorts based upon Leth's first film, a warm satire of the anthropological search for the fantasy of 'The Perfect Human', von Trier, leading scion of the Dogme school of rule bound movie-making (no ice cream for the crew, galoshes to be worn at all times), directs Leth's work whilst placing obstacles in his directorial path. Poor old Jorgen is seen sipping vodka with Lars (shock, horror, before midday!) as they discuss each layer of obfuscation that will swaddle Leth's next stab at the making of a movie under duress.

This is an interesting and fairly righteous waddle down Arty Avenue, von Trier and Leth's conversations before and after each short is shot are shown in voyeuristic if subtitled detail. Access to the creative process is both fascinating and irritating as these two high brow northern Europeans mutter away like a couple of Fast Show rejects. I admire the project but found their emotional distance a problem. The coldness with which vonTrier sketches out each new obstruction is matched by Leth's distanced reception of its parameters.

Rule One demands that no shot last more than 12 frames (ho ho, a joke, Leth being known for his long shots), the second rule bound short sees Leth popping off to the worst place he has been in the world: Falkland Road, Bombay's slum red light district to shoot without showing where he is filming. Leth sort of cheats showing the neighbourhood through an opaque screen, von Trier scolds him. It's interesting but where's it all going? It is when we reach the fourth obstruction ("make a cartoon", "I hate cartoons", "no, I hate cartoons", "I hate cartoons". . . for they hate cartoons) do we start to sense where the tricky von Trier is taking us. A fairly deft Flash inspired piece later and the fifth obstruction reveals that destination.

Trier's goal is to shock his friend into an emotional entanglement with the world, hoping that each encumbered short will push Leth out of the moribund depression that invests his Tahitian bolthole. The fifth obstruction finds Leth narrating a script written for him over a von Trier edit of footage collected in the making of the rest of the film. Von Trier's loving character assassination is harsh but fails to find that magical moment of self-realisation in its target and in doing so he comes over as both bolshie and innocent as he teases the stoical Leth onward. A pleasing film but definitely one not to be entered with a tub of popcorn, what restricts the film is the Oedipal relationship at its heart. Leth (67) taught von Trier in his youth and now the angry student is visiting his revenge on pater for ills imagined; the loving and stoical father and the angry Dogme boy. The friction of their relationship mars the film and ends up creating an intriguing but irritating whole.

Factoid Corner: Leth does the voice-over for the Tour de France on Danish telly!

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