Word: zentropa
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Zentropa." You are on a train in Germany...
...mind The Passion of Joan of Arc, the 1928 silent masterpiece by another Dane, Carl Dreyer. Von Trier's film isn't in that class, but he gets points for wild ambition. Like Bess, the writer-director has undergone a conversion. His early pictures, Element of Crime and Zentropa, were wondrously busy examples of cinematic Euroflash; here he goes for sweeping visual sentiment. He wants to press you up against the characters, to make you feel the heat under their pale skin. So, as in his 1994 Danish TV series, The Kingdom (a bizarre blend of ER and Twin Peaks...
...Watson, Breaking the Waves also gave hints that the world's leading festival and much of world cinema were at an identity-crisis point, more than ever lost in Hollywood's long shadow. The film's Danish director, Von Trier, built his reputation on labyrinthine parables (Element of Crime, Zentropa) with much camera dazzle; but to aim for the big movie market, Von Trier set Breaking the Waves in Scotland and made it in English. Meanwhile, Bernardo Bertolucci returned to Italy for his first film at home in 15 years, yet his Stealing Beauty was also an English-language film...
...Zentropa, the European cinema comes alive again...
...Zentropa is the strangest. It has the overweening will to be a masterpiece and the verve nearly to carry it off. Big, enthralling and, frankly, nuts, Zentropa gives notice that European cinema is alive and kicking, one more time...