Manderlay (15)

Dir. Lars Von Trier, Denmark/Sweden/Netherlands /France/UK, 2005, 139 mins, 2005

Cast: Bryce Dallas Howard, Willem Defoe, Danny Glover, Isaach de Bankole, Jeremy Davies

Review by Peter Fraser

Manderlay jostles Dogville as the second part of Lars Von Trier’s sarcastically denoted trilogy ‘USA – Land of Opportunities.’ In the first film Grace appears in US town Dogville seeking asylum to escape from her gangster father, only to be enslaved by the townsfolk. The denizens in turn meet a bloody end when Grace’s father arrives and she takes a vacation from her cherished humanism long enough to exact an extremely prejudicial revenge. In Manderlay, which takes place shortly thereafter, Grace (now played by Bryce Dallas Howard) and her father (now played by Willem Defoe) encounter a plantation where slavery continues seventy years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Flaunting idealism notably unbowed by Dogville’s homicidal coup de grace, Grace elects to free the slaves and teach them democracy.

Of course, things aren’t so simple. Von Trier has been criticised for making films about the United States without so much as placing a pinkie on the country’s soil but it’s a fatuous argument. In truth Dogville and Manderlay aren’t so much about the USA per se as the values that the USA embodies, promotes and lauds, both overseas and within its own borders. Therefore the film is abstract and the characters are ciphers for a director speaking in philosophical code. The Brechtian distanciation of the theatrical mise-en-scene, which I still love, and John Hurt’s hyper-ironised voiceover extend their artificiality to the paper figures inhabiting the invisible houses. In Dogville Nicole Kidman was pretty splendid, like a flame somehow burning in a vacuum, but while Howard does no mean job, Grace barely rises above a dramatic contrivance.

But that’s ok. It’s not that kind of film. It could, in any case, be said of most of Von Trier’s work. He’s a formalist and a considerable formal innovator - even The Idiots is a formal experiment - so people take second place. Given that one of his ambitions in this latest trilogy seems to be to query the notion of ‘character’ itself, as well as every other formal tradition, these crayon sketches are quite appropriate. Grace is a liberal descendent of Voltaire’s Candide, expecting the best but experiencing the worst, or de Sade’s Justine, an innocent corrupted by the world around her. In other words she’s a macguffin, a vehicle for the film’s ideas. Hence her generally unconvincing metamorphoses from caring to killing are as interesting because they are unconvincing as anything else. She brings grace…and favour.

Nonetheless whereas Dogville, through game performances from Kidman and Bettany, had a tragic catharsis, Manderlay feels much more like a cerebral game of political head scratching. If that’s your bag then great, but it isn’t for everyone. It’s clear that the emancipation in Manderlay is intended to have overtones of regime change, in which case we can hardly avoid mentioning Iraq. Can freedom be imposed from above and does one type of freedom, the liberal version propounded by the USA, fit every context? Von Trier isn’t suggesting that anyone should be enslaved, nor presumably is he nostalgic for Saddam Hussein, but he is cocking a serious snook at certain liberal pieties and the sanctimony of the USA given its history of slavery and slavery’s legacy, as recently witnessed in the New Orleans floods.

Discuss this film here

Metrodome have announced the UK DVD release of Manderlay for 3rd July 2006 priced at £19.99.

Extras include:

• Feature commentary with director Lars Von Trier and Director of Photography Anthony Dodd Mantle
• 40 minute making of featurette 'The Road to Manderlay'
• Trailer