Word: zentropa
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...TITLE: ZENTROPA...
...Zentropa gives signs that the answer is yes. This existential melodrama was originally known as Europa, and Danish director Lars von Trier's ambition is that vast: Continent-wide. Set on a German train rumbling through the rubble of World War II -- but suggesting the recent chaos of post-communist Europe -- Zentropa plays like a hallucinogenic remake of The Third Man. A naive American, Leo (Jean-Marc Barr), walks into a web of political duplicity spun by a desperate provocateuse (Barbara Sukowa), a cynical Allied officer (Eddie Constantine) and lots of supporting sharks and werewolves. And where is Harry Lime...
...will never be nailed on that rap. He passionately promotes himself and European movies. At last year's Cannes festival, when this film lost out to the Hollywood comedy Barton Fink, Von Trier threw a snit fit, angrily claiming that his movie was bolder and better. He was right. Zentropa plunders the film vocabulary -- back projection and superimposition, black-and-white with shrieks of color -- to anchor its weirdness in classical technique. The legerdemain reminds you of the artificial nature of movies even as it draws you back to the era when pictures seduced the audience into a communal trance...
Like The Nasty Girl from Germany, Toto le Heros from Belgium and Delicatessen from France, Zentropa finds movie energy in spiritual malaise. These films take their cue from the dystopic visions of Blade Runner and Brazil -- pictures set in the future but cluttered with decor from the film noir past. The imagery possesses a kind of dour voluptuousness: bleak and busy. Their crammed, skewed compositions excite the eye. These movies won't push Lethal 3 off the multiplex screen; they can't compete with Hollywood product. And that is the happy point. They are appealingly strange -- different from the American...
...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...